If you always questioned the integrity of some contemporary art—like those stacked vacuum cleaners of Jeff Koons’s—you’re in good company. Robert Cenedella, the magnetic 76-year-old subject of Victor Kanefsky’s affectionate and vibrant if not thoroughly captivating documentary has a thing or two to say on the topic. He speaks from experience as a uniquely talented outsider artist of four decades who fought to sustain an uneven career amid a money-driven, impulsive NYC art scene.
The lifelong rabble-rouser who once chose Beethoven over Elvis (Cenedella’s reactionary “I Love Ludwig” buttons put him through art school) never quite became the flavor of the month à la the Warhol works of the Pop Art movement, which he famously mocked in a 1965 exhibition called “Yes Art.” Instead, Cenedella unofficially became the illegitimate child of the local art world: There’s a double meaning to the film’s title once he reveals certain family secrets (as Sarah Polley did in her self-exposing Stories We Tell) and recounts the effect this trauma had on his work.
Breezy and vivid, Art Bastard ultimately delivers the person: criminally underrated yet still principled and generous. It just leaves you wishing for more defiance, especially when a conventional tone takes over with too many interviewees and overpowers the film’s most lucrative asset: a pulsating New York backdrop.