Imagine if you had baby pictures of yourself posing on top of an Andy Warhol Brillo Box, knowing that the work was traded away and eventually sold for millions by a subsequent owner decades later. This unusual situation prompted the filmmaker Lisanne Skyler to write, produce and direct the HBO documentary Brillo Box (3¢ Off), named for the Andy Warhol piece that her father snapped up for $1,000 as a young collector in 1969 and which was auctioned at Christie’s in New York in November 2010 for over $3m. “It seemed impossible that we once owned this now-iconic Warhol sculpture that still pushes buttons to this day,” Skyler explained in a statement of her drive to make the film. “I always wondered where the Brillo Box went once it left my family’s living room.” The documentary traces the piece from Skyler’s childhood Manhattan apartment to the Christie’s auction room, becoming, in the director’s words “an exploration of the complex and occasionally contradictory ways we value art”. The 40-minute film, which HBO will air in 2017, is set to premiere on Monday, 3 October at the New York Film Festival, with a second screening the following day.
