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starts out great but bogs down and gets tedious.
at its get go a great quote pulls you in "everyone knows a fairy tale always starts with 'once upon a time', but a trucker's tale starts with 'you ain't going to believe this shit!'"
a older woman, teri horton, who happens to be a truck driver finds an "ugly" painting in a flea market and buys it for a friend. its too big to get into her trailer so she keeps it and tries to sell it in a yard sale. where someone tells her it may be a jackson pollock. to which she supposedly replies "who the #$&% is jackson pollock?" she learns it may be worth serious money, learns some about pollock, and begins a quest to figure out if her painting is in fact made by pollock. its an unsigned work. she takes it to a few art market types who blow her off as a crazy old woman truck driver. that is the crux of the story. she's mad about being looked down upon. as she continues to now prove that the painting is by pollock, experts and then forensic scientists are brought in and hired. like other films of this type, the experts are often crazy eccentrics because it makes for interesting film. we are made to believe they don't know any better than anyone else. science then proves fact...or at least a good maybe. what the painting lacks for the art world is provenance (which is a notion explained well here, especially by a gallery dealer who won't touch the painting because he can guarantee it to his clients)
and then...well.. the film takes a serious dive when it presents teri's fake provenance story as she attempted to present it to potential buyers. her story, without even checking for facts, is wildly far fetched. they attempt to frame it as somewhat of a possibility since pollock was a raging drunk and his wife/dealer 'couldn't possibly have kept track of all of his paintings'. its the way they present her fake story which immediately sends red flags into this documentary. even though they admit its fake and even far fetched; saying some people actually bought the story...if not the art. from there the film drags out in the same arguments over and over and it goes on for too long. in short there is a finger print on the back of it that is matched to one in pollocks studio and there is a seemingly similar painting known to be pollocks in the moma. (persumedly signed though i don't know this for fact). and the problem with the painting remains not that its signed, nor that the experts question it and the science seems to approve of it, but that it has no provenance. without that provenance, as its said here, the painting has almost no value. because in the world of money that is the art market...its not the visual work thats valuable but the story behind it.
at one point teri is offered $2 million, which she rejects thinking she is going to get 60 or so out of it. at the end she hires an exconvict (art sales fraud) to set up a company and find investors to begin to build appeal for the piece. they immediately talk about taking her out of the picture...send her back to the trailer with some cash. she doesn't seem to care at this point (some 10+ years after buying the work)
so we learn: art experts are full of shit mystics. scientists are absolute but no one cares. art is bought for the story not for the visual work. wealthy buyers do not deal with low class truckers/trailer trash. sigh. i don't know who this was meant to appeal to, but it did leave me a bit sad overall.
its worth a watch, especially for artist but has a limited audience and i'd be hard pressed to expect anyone to really like this.
(6/10)
6/10
