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Art world gets a roasting in Palme d’Or film

By The Art Newspaper
29 May 2017
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The art world is skewered in The Square, the Swedish film that has scooped the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival. According to the UK newspaper The Telegraph, the movie, directed by Ruben Ostlund, is a “blackly comic send-up of the art world’s pretensions and neuroses”. It centres on the director of a contemporary art gallery who makes a splash with a new performance art space called The Square. Peter Bradshaw reports in The Guardian that the most excruciating part is a formal dinner for patrons who encounter performance artist Oleg dressed as an ape. “The post-dinner entertainment will be provided by Oleg who will clamber into the dining hall, grunting and scratching and hooting and maybe poking the diners, and the guests in all their finery will naturally be amused by the resulting Darwinian insights. But Oleg has an intense method-style commitment to his act and it gets out of control.” To top it all off, UK actor Dominic West does a turn as a pompous visiting artist decked out in silk pyjamas. 

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