Whaam! Blam! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation

Provocative doc about how the art world chooses what counts as "high art" and decides whose work deserves acknowledgement and compensation. Hussey does a great job of choosing his interview subjects (though I wish we'd heard from Lichtenstein's son Mitchell, a NY indie film and art world mainstay) and of letting them present the issues from their perspective. As a lover of modern art, I was shocked by the revelations in this film, but the way some interview subjects breezed by the controversy, and the explanations of the lawyer, helped make it clear that many have long been incentivized to buy into the "high art" framing of oversized, glossy, derivative work.

I did not expect a doc on this artist to end up being about income inequality, labor exploitation, class warfare, and (my inference only here) billionaire and authoritarian money laundering, but the fact that it is makes it very relevant to the wider world of today. Despite being a tale consisting almost entirely of white men, it also relates to contested and newly-urgent museum world issues around colonization and the theft and display of cultural treasures. The doc adds an interesting dimension by showing how, even amongst white men, the wealthy and connected work together to pilfer and denigrate the work of poorly paid and exploited hired hands. I never thought of Lichtenstein's work as flattering the taste of the rich and highly educated by ironically sneering down at art made for the masses, but this doc made sure I can no longer see it any other way.