The art world—with its mystery, intrigue and mega-bucks patrons—is a hot topic in Hollywood at the moment, with another blockbuster movie in the pipeline focused on arty shenanigans. According to the Rotten Tomatoes website, the new blockbuster movie The Kill Room, released later this month in the US, follows a New York art dealer, played by Uma Thurman, who teams up with a hitman (Joe Manganiello) and his boss (Samuel L. Jackson) to launch a money laundering scheme, combining the art world with the underworld. But the hitman accidentally becomes an overnight art sensation as the anonymous artist The Bagman. There are some predictable lines—“My five-year-old makes better paintings”—and also some funny quips, especially from Jackson’s character who, on perusing a painting, says: “This thing that looks like a smurf with diarrhoea would sell for a million bucks and the IRS wouldn’t bat an eyelid.” Such things would never take place in the real art world, would they?
