Art For Art’s Sake Don’t Pay the Bills: The Burnt Orange Heresy

As though director Giuseppe Capotondi and screenwriter Scott B. Smith unwittingly took a key kernel of a driving plot point in Tenet, The Burnt Orange Heresy also finds Elizabeth Debicki in a central role involving a forged painting. This time, she isn’t quite so wizened, playing the part of doe-eyed Berenice Hollis, a Minnesotan tourist traveling in Italy who happens to encounter art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang) during one of his lectures in Milan (she wandered in for the free snacks). Unlike the other glass-eyed American tourists in the room, Berenice is genuinely riveted by the story James tells about the painting. When he reveals that he made up the entire narrative to prove a point about how the story the art critic tells always influences the perception–therefore value–of a painting, Berenice remains the only one in the room who still wants a print of it. 

When she speaks with him after the lecture, with no one left in the room, of course, she reminds, “That painting…I’d like a print.” He smiles, “There aren’t any. That was just what you call an… oratorical gesture.” She raises her brow. “Oh, so you’re one of those?” “One of which?” he asks faux innocently. She fires back, “A liar.” It is, to be sure, this initial hunch she has about James that Berenice ought to have gone with, as affluent art collector Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger–yes, Mick Jagger) reminds, “Always trust your hunches, my dear. You have the gift,” at his lavish Lake Como residence. Because, obviously, within fifteen minutes of the movie’s start, Berenice has agreed to accompany James on this little informal job interview at Cassidy’s villa, though he isn’t aware exactly how involved the “audition” in question will get.

But it’s an audition he’s willing to go to any lengths to secure. For the state of James’ finances is evident from the start, and the overt signs of his insolvency indicate he’s desperate enough to do anything–and use his well-worn skill of lying (massaging the truth, as he would likely call it) in the process. To that end, the story of Norwegian artist Nils Ingen and his sister, Nora–the two figures James discusses in his “meaning behind the painting” explanation at the beginning–mutates several times over the course of the movie, wielded as an allegory for the contortion every story takes when it comes to the lore behind a piece of artwork. If there is anyone who is aware of those contortions, it’s notoriously reclusive artist Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), who just so happens to live rent-free on Cassidy’s property as part of what Cassidy calls the Debney Trust. 

Speaking to James privately about why he summoned him, Cassidy offers him a chance to interview Debney and review his latest work so long as James can manage to secure him a painting… whatever it takes to do so. Bearing this in mind, Capotondi, as an Italian with a therefore inherent flair for visual drama, is fond of marking his flawed protagonist with a symbol of doom. That symbol harkens back to cropping up within the first three minutes of the film, as James has already invoked the image of flies on a listless floodplain. He then uses the insect again to explain to Berenice that, “In medieval painting, the fly represented sin, so if an artist added a fly to a portrait, for instance, it meant that that person was damned.” Soon after, we’re given plenty of instances of James’ skin being graced by a fly. The insect metaphor persists even down to the print Berenice has on dress at one point, filled with “pretty” insects, like butterflies and dragonflies. In other words, her innocent aura couldn’t be further away from attracting flies without prefixes. 

Debney can see that about her right away, though she insists to him that she’s not some easily breakable egg. He smiles paternally at her and returns, “Do you know the saddest egg of all? The egg that believes it’s a stone.” And it’s clear that Berenice really is, for all her attempts at coming off as aloof and “vixen-like,” as much of a fish in a shark tank as one would expect of a person from a small town near Duluth. Yet, as Cassidy notes, “Nice to be from a small town though, isn’t it? You venture into the world like a newborn, free to be whomever you choose.” Indeed, such a line indicates that there is something about Berenice that is at least somewhat inauthentic. As though she’s a less hardcore version of Natalie Portman’s “Alice Ayres” in Closer. Fortunately for her, one supposes, James isn’t all that concerned with asking too many questions, far more interested in the ones he might be able to pose to Debney. 

Debney, however, has never bought into the so-called “cachet” of being embraced by the art world, knowing full well it’s all bull shit. To a man like James, Debney’s attempts to deny the galleries and the critics a chance to review his work is a maneuver tantamount to full-fledged cruelty, for he believes Debney “owes it” to the world. That all people should be privy to his talents. But with Debney’s refusal to show them, it all boils down to: “Let me be blunt: art would not exist without criticism.” Such a statement would, naturally, come from a man who wrote a book called The Power of the Critic. And art cannot be critiqued unless it is seen. Which is precisely why Debney refuses to show it. Indeed, his most famous “painting,” an empty frame (which sounds like something out of Maurizio Cattelan’s banana taped to a wall playbook), is something he finally explains to James as follows: “All those words, all those opinions. That was the meaning of the empty frame. Fill this with your chatter.” Feed the art world machine. It doesn’t matter how, so long as they have something to discuss with the flow of pseudo-intellectual diarrhea of the mouth. 

As Debney further expounds on the senselessness of sharing art with anyone who would critique it, he brings up the famed cave in Lascaux. Whether the barrage of prehistoric art inside of it was the first prime example of the human need to create or simply a means of effective communication, ritual performing or storytelling, Debney hypothesizes that “they had no desire to share their work. They were hiding it from eyes they considered unworthy.” Alas, the unworthy eyes seized upon it eventually and, of course, that’s what nearly destroyed the work. Literally. Thousands upon thousands of people trampling through it, sucking up all the air around it, contaminating it with their body heat. Debney was right. They were unworthy–the majority of them there not to appreciate art, but to somehow siphon a bit of “culture” for themselves. As though proximity to great art can, in turn, make you great. Well, it can’t. The only thing that can, despite the emphasis on financial wealth society puts on us, is not being a morally bankrupt person. Naturally, this tends to mean you’re not going to end up getting very far in life. 

“I’ll die–all for love,” Berenice jokes during their initial tryst together after James’ lecture. The more accurate statement, in the end, proves to be, “I’ll be the sacrificial lamb–all for art.” Or rather, a forgery of art. For only the purest of souls can create it, a purity that seems to infer never being able to profit from it. But art for art’s sake will never be enough for the impure artist, or the art world trying to monetize it.