Imposture-prone or — simpler — fictitious avant-garde strategies as well as their vulnerable practitioners and critics are celebrated in the film (Untitled), written by Jonathan Parker and Catherine di Napoli, directed by Parker. In just two columns of text NY Times critic Stephen Holden deploys a massive array of double-edged vocabulary that unsettles to the gut. (Untitled)’s protagonist, a conceptual composer with a perpetually furrowed brow, is said to be tormented with a teasingly paradoxical attitude... [a] hostile scowl. The anti-hero is so self-absorbed and ungenerous that when confronted with experimental work in other fields he is as rudely dismissive as any provincial philistine. Meanwhile, to highlight the acerbic entwinement of sexual performativity and aesthetic judgment, a cheating, gallery-owning and aesthetically ‘disingenuous’ girlfriend shines her popping eyes like a bright screwball. Holden notes other types, including a self-loathing conceptual artist whose works have self-explanatory titles like “Pushpin Stuck Into Wall.” (Untitled) goes for broadly obvious, easy targets, in other words, in a line of lampooning artist-fish in a barrel, a long satirical line that spoofs an avant-garde tradition that goes back at least as far as Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Some would-be targets are employed for aesthetic as well as comedic affect. Avantist David Lang writes the goofy music for (Untitled) and film maker Kyle Ng constructs proto-conceptual pieces, among them, a taxidermist monkey sucking on a vacuum cleaner (Jeff Koons, no?). Holden’s review encapsulates a chapter on current aesthetic temperaments and fomented doubletalk that run for cover under the rubrics of satirical outrage and conceptual deflation.

— 2009