Out of the Picture is a feature-length film about art critics living through a period of transformation for both art and media. Not only has the art world changed, with long lines for Instagrammable art shows, a worldwide proliferation of biennials, mind-boggling art market records and hashtag-driven discourses. Art’s place in the world has changed, too.
Today, the once-rare tools of the artist are a swipe or a click away. The planet at large is generating visual culture on a scale that is hard to fathom.
All of this change makes the job of discerning what’s genuinely artful, what’s worthy of our collective attention—the pathfinding role of critics—as essential and challenging as it’s ever been.
For years, our team has followed a handful of writers who have made it their life’s work to translate the experiences of art for others. We followed Jen Graves through the underground art scene in Seattle and Carolina Miranda to a mountain top “dashboard Jesus.” We witnessed Jenee Osterheldt experience artful acts of memory at the intersection where George Floyd was killed, and we were there when Hrag Vartanian invented the term “blogazine” for his then fledgling website, Hyperallergic.
Criticism has been remade while our cameras rolled. In this critical time—when beliefs about kids in cages can be formed at museums and monuments—some of these critics have risen to become essential voices for their generation while others have become marginalized, obsolete even.
While there have been countless films made about artists, Out of the Picture is the first documentary film to be made about art critics in the United States.
While ostensibly about an esoteric subject—the American art critic—our film is also about something everyone can relate to: change. Out of the Picture is poised to prompt a national conversation about the nature of art, modern life and how meaning gets made in the 21st century.
