The timing could not be better for The Price of Everything to open in Seattle—it is exactly four weeks after the Banksy print Girl with Balloon (purchased for $1.4 million) “self-destructed” at the London Sotheby’s auction house. This stunt, and Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary, captures the buying and selling of art as exactly what it is: an aristocratic struggle for control, status, and ownership.
In The Price of Everything, Kahn pays just as much attention to the viewpoint of the artists as to the participants in the auctions themselves (the buyers and sellers). A cinematic cutting between responses from each creates a fabricated town-hall-type dialogue about material valuation and what it means to love/covet art. There is little regarding the value of art that the artists and collectors/sellers agree on.