Educational Media Reviews Online

The Next Big Thing opens with shots of fashionable people texting on cell phones while they exit their limos to enter a crowded art event. As if observing this scene, art collector Michael Hort then suggests that some art fairs have become spectacles, where art is no longer art, but a commodity: “It’s not about the art anymore, it’s really about the aura and the value.”

Despite a sense of nostalgia that this quote elicits, The Next Big Thing does not dwell on this loss, but focuses instead on the current boom in contemporary art by exploring the relationship between art and spectacle, giving voice to collectors, museums, galleries, auction houses and artists.

The film suggests that underlying this explosion in art prices, despite economic downturns, is the rise of new global art collectors, many of whom view art as an investment, and, by doing so, have turned contemporary art into a global currency. Filmmaker Frank Van Den Engel demonstrates this point by periodically featuring an on-going Christie’s auction—terminating in a $43,500,000 Basquiat painting and a $52 million Jackson Pollack. Between cuts of the auction, the film features comments by art collectors shown with their varied collections; museum curators and gallery owners expressing different points of view; and artists such as Chuck Close, Andrian Ghenie and Jack Whitten, who collectively and objectively acknowledge this transition in the art market and how they have adapted to it. Although not polemical,The Next Big Thing does question the incestuous nature of the price of art and the various interests who control the market, as well as raises questions about the transient nature of the current market and the consequence for artists who are judged by how much money they make.

The film is well shot, and the editing effectively represents the different interests and actors who make up today’s soaring art market.