“It would seem that curators have replaced bankers as the villains du jour,” writes Jörg Heiser in a piece for frieze that addresses, among other showdowns, one here in Berlin that’s just resulted in the police clearing out occupiers from one of the city’s most vital institutions.
“So, why the vitriol?” asks Heiser. “A Swedish film that won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes might provide an answer. . . . A few minutes into the film, all of the clichés are in place: the slick curator slouching on a designer sofa; the shallow, rip-off art works; the cryptic art-speak; the failure to respond candidly; the non-committal intimacy; the brutal doing-away with tradition, replaced by empty promises. Yet, Östlund’s film is more nuanced than it initially appears, and so is its central character. . . . The Square makes achingly clear that curators have been increasingly enmeshed in a public showdown of the pretty versus the scandalous, the smoothly marketable versus the bathetically moralizing. . . . Perhaps it’s time for curators to opt out of the false choices, live with their bad reputations and just get on with it. If the devil has all the best tunes, curators should stage all the best shows.”
The Square “follows the chief curator (Claes Bang) of a contemporary art museum in Sweden as he oversees the installation of a conceptual project that envisions a square in the courtyard of the museum that will serve as ‘a sanctuary of trust and caring,’ one where ‘we all share equal rights and obligations,’” explains Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “The film asks the central question: Can altruism, equality, and fairness be achieved by unforced, democratic consensus? (Not for nothing is the square placed exactly where the statue of a monarch once stood.) Then it complicates its inquiry by giving us a variety of scenarios, some gut-bustingly hilarious, that demonstrate just how petty, manipulative, weak, and cruel humans can be.”
“Östlund thinks, shallowly, in set pieces,” argues Keith Uhlich: “Christian [Bang] has a one-night stand with an American journalist (Elisabeth Moss) that revolves primarily around the disposal of a used condom; a self-absorbed sculptor (Dominic West) who attends his Q&A in pajamas is constantly interrupted by an audience member with Tourette’s; a performance artist (Terry Notary, the go-to movement coach for many a motion-captured Hollywood blockbuster) literally monkeys around at a black-tie gala, ultimately bringing out the worst in the many affluent attendees. That last sequence is key to Östlund’s intent: He wants to confront and overturn our self-gratifying notions about art, to reveal how so much of it increasingly speaks to a pre-selected audience (like many a Cannes prizewinner, you might say). First, though, he'd have to have anything approaching an inspired vision.”
“It’s easy to mock artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, and, fortunately, this isn’t Östlund’s real agenda,” writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. “He’s far more interested in the way power and wealth function in urban life; unlike almost every other film set in big cities in the West, The Square is true to the amount of homelessness contained there and the extremes of class conflict that result from the rich and poor constantly bumping against each other.”
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“Following Östlund’s Force Majeure, The Square is another squirmy satire skewering the failure of citizens of Western democracies to adhere to the foundational principles of their societies,” writes Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay.
The Square screens once more, tomorrow night (October 1), as part of the Main Slate at this year’s New York Film Festival. A theatrical run begins in late October.
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