FILM SCREENING: CON ARTIST

"an entertaining boom-era fable" 
- New York Magazine

As a young artist in the 1980s New York scene, Mark Kostabi gained international fame and fortune via a Warhol-inspired gimmick: to mass-produce and sell thousands of paintings per year, conceived of and executed not by himself, but by a revolving stable of hired hands. He then signed and sold these paintings, proclaiming that “modern art is a con and I am the world’s greatest con artist.” But Kostabi’s cynical success and overt antagonism eventually caused his closest allies to turn on him, resulting in a remarkable fall from grace.

Now approaching fifty, Kostabi masks a bruised ego as he tries to entice women, hocks paintings on Italian TV, speaks at a Yale University Master’s Tea, stars in a self-financed TV game show, and hitches his dreams of stardom to a high profile commission from the Vatican. As he tries to gain control of the film itself, Kostabi’s laughable narcissism illuminates insights into his own ego while reflecting America’s rampant obsession with celebrity and money.

USA * 2010 * 84 minutes * Documentary * Not-rated