Yasmina Reza’s Art has two subjects, one of them serious and worthy of attention, the other slightly embarrassing and perhaps even philistine. The better theme – and the one that gets most of the stage time – is male friendship and the unspoken agreements that sustain it.
The three men in this case are Marc, Serge and Yvan, whose comradeship is threatened by a disagreement over a painting, and who eventually discover what awkward and never-admitted assumptions have bound them together for over a decade. The painting they disagree about – an all-white canvas by a celebrated modernist named Antrios – is the occasion for the second theme: the imaginative bankruptcy of modern art and the pretentiousness of those who claim to admire it.
From the moment that Serge admits he paid 200,000 francs for the monochromatic rectangle, Reza implicitly makes the case that today’s art world is a den of con men and women supported by suckers who wouldn’t know a masterpiece from a mud puddle. This argument is ridiculous.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2009.