MovieChat Forums > Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) Discussion > What was so special about Dease's painti...

What was so special about Dease's paintings?


Why is everyone so fascinated by them?

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[deleted]

But there are tons of similar painting by other artists.
And the gimmick of using bodily fluids mixed with paint is nothing new.

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There's nothing new but it was cool. I like the Dease paintings but I have a taste for dark, creepy stuff.

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I loved them too

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The exact question I ask about some of the crap I see when I go to art museums. In the real world, it's all about who you know and who's blowing who. In this movie, it's just about a story to generate some creepiness.

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I suspect the types of people who could be hurt by the art's "curse" are the very ones who are most fascinated by Dease. And notice that Jon (I think that was the name of the Italian guy who got hung by his tie) was killed even though he never made money off of Dease. He was trying to ruin the sales of Dease, and Morf made a move to do the same but both of them were killed anyway. (I also think part of why Morf was killed was because he went ahead with Josephine's suggestion and wrote a negative review of Ricky's work even though he apparently liked it - not only making him a liar about working from his adoration when he was talking to Gretchen, but making him an analogue of his father's abusiveness and an indirect murderer in Dease's spirit-y eyes most likely.) It's more about corruption and defiling the meaning of the art in how it's handled than it is about who sold it. I doubt people who don't put a huge weight on the value of art would likely be affected by the curse at all.

If I'm right, most of the homeless folks who managed to steal some of the art to sell on the street probably wouldn't be affected. Some of the folks who buy it might from them might, though. John Malkovich's character seemed similar to the others at first, and I suspected initially he might go a route where he uses Dease for inspiration and that gets him killed, but instead he returned to the roots of art. Simple expression, the joy in the making of it, and the opposite of what Josephine said: You don't have to show your art to the world for there to be meaning in it. Obviously Dease believed that and I don't think it's an accident Malkovich's artist didn't get caught up in all the Dease madness the art world was engaging in. It's not like he didn't know Dease existed. Similar with the more honest folks at the museum. They recognized there is value in the Dease paintings but they weren't obsessive about it.

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