Adam Goldberg is a brooding and failing experimental composer; his brother is a successful painter of institutional art. Goldberg makes crap that nobody likes: unlistenable avant-garde skronk-as-slapstick (his pieces involve, among other things, the sound of him kicking a bucket hanging on a string). His brother makes crap that lots of people like: gentle, inoffensive pastel abstracts that are all but designed for hotel and hospital lobbies. Neither is happy; both want to continue making crap yet be regarded as geniuses. They must have the deepest sympathies of this film's director and screenwriters.

(Untitled) attempts to satirize the modern art world with a parade of tired caricatures (the shut-in outsider "artist," the brash and flashy Damien Hirst proxy, the gallery owner with the impossible outfits) and hammy isn't-art-just-so-fucking-wacky? sight gags. (For an actually funny, sharp satire of modern art, you might try, oh, just off the top of my head, Pecker by John Waters.)

Meanwhile, some unlikely love triangle plays out between the brothers and the impossibly outfitted gallery owner, but the characters are so flat and underdeveloped that it registers only enough to bore. About the only character you feel for is the Russian opera singer Goldberg hires to perform in one of his pieces, who cracks midrehearsal, "Who's writing this shit? It's stupid! It's shit!" Sing it, lady.

The dialogue—and this is the kind of short-on-plot, long-on-talking indie film that lives or dies by the wit of its dialogue—is not only dull and unfunny but loaded with the sort of clichés that first-year art-school students should be ashamed to speak even stoned at 1:00 a.m. in their dorm rooms: "Is the marketplace the measure of artistic merit?" "What's the difference between art and entertainment?" The marketplace should take care of this film just fine, as one thing art and entertainment have in common is that neither can be found in (Untitled).