Wallcreeping

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Colleen Kelsey on looking for works of art in works of fiction.

Of all the acknowledgements listed in the “Special Thanks” credits of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), it’s not the invocation of long-lost ‘80s Manhattan fashion mecca Charivari, or the Florentine suppliers of Michael Douglas’s bullish spread-collar striped shirts and power-clashing ties, that hold my attention. Rather, it’s the flashy litany of real-world art galleries and artists tallied up, Tony Shafrazi and Julian Schnabel among them, that confirm the “I Spy”-style party game I’ve been playing while watching the film.

The lurid finance fable, released scant months after Black Monday, is overloaded with of-the-era consumerist allusions, art being one of the most amusing. Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, the craven “money never sleeps” financier, flexes his sizeable collection often, most memorably in a monologue to his new protégé, Bud (Charlie Sheen) about an imposing black-and-green Joan Miró abstraction lording over a Picasso and a pair of Jean Dubuffet paintings in his office. He offers up one of his typically lizardy bons mots: “This painting here, I bought it 10 years ago for $60,000. I could sell it today for $600,000. The illusion has become real,” a lesson on the most slippery commodity of all—potential.

Other pieces in the film read as gags of the decade’s market hubris, archetypal examples of “trophy art,” a category that Daniel Riley so adroitly explains in his recent GQ profile of Jeff Koons. Bud and his Krizia-swaddled interior designer girlfriend, played by Daryl Hannah, break up in front of a Schnabel plate painting in the grotesquely-appointed, postmodern-style penthouse she decorated. He’s angry enough to throw a liquor bottle at a wall-mounted Keith Haring face sculpture; off-camera is a nightmarish Lucas Samaras oil of a succession of grinning skulls. The “John Chamberlain” smashed steel wall sculptures at Gekko’s Hamptons compound seem to be faked for the movie, though they register as intended, but a George Condo, fleetingly glimpsed in another scene, is the real deal: lent by Schnabel from his personal collection.

FRAMED

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