Art-world satire is uninspired

To be sure, New York's art scene - with its clad-in-black gallerists, its attitudinal hangers-on, its moneyed collectors, and most of all, its variously self-promoting, insecure, insufferable artists - is ripe for movie satire.

(Untitled), however, is not that movie, not that satire.

Starring a brooding Adam Goldberg as a composer of new (and extremely dissonant, listener-unfriendly) music and Marley Shelton as a fashionably bespectacled gallery owner, the film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.

Goldberg's scowling Adrian leads a trio of musicians through a jolting cacophony of pieces written for piano, reeds, and percussion - and the percussion includes clanging buckets, crumpled paper, and breaking glass. Shelton's Madeleine is cool, classy, and confident - and she has the luxury of supporting a parade of avant gardists because her boyfriend, Adrian's brother, paints palatable abstracts in demand by corporate clients.

The issue of art versus commerce, then, is key. What defines success? What is art? Is artistic compromise the same as creative suicide? And what does a taxidermized deer in a pearl necklace say about the human condition? (Vinnie Jones, overdoing it as a besotted Damien Hirst-like conceptual artist, is the perpetrator of the taxidermy installations.)

(Untitled) asks a lot of intriguing questions - more intriguing than the film itself.EndText