White Lies

Anthony Hancock gives up his office job to become an abstract artist. He has a lot of enthusiasm, but little talent, and critics scorn his work. Nevertheless, he impresses an emerging very talented artist. Hancock proceeds to con the art world into thinking he is a genius.

It's the start of the 20th century, and Tuccio, resident playwright of a theatre repertory company offers the owners of the company his new play, "Illuminata". They reject it, saying it's not finished, and intrigue starts that involves influential critic Bevalaqua, theatre star Celimene, young lead actors and other theatre residents

Awkward, shy and delightfully funny, Polly Vandersma is an "organizationally impaired" temporary assistant who finally gets her first permanent job at the age of 31. While she works for the curator of an art gallery, Polly narrates her own story, sharing the comical and bittersweet pretensions of the art world. At the same time, she reveals a special part of her own private world, taking the viewer to enchanted places in this quiet assault on the notion of authority everywhere.

Bouncing between Europe and the United States as often as she would between lovers, Peggy Guggenheim’s life was as swirling as the design of her uncle’s museum, and reads more like fiction than any reality imaginable. Peggy Guggenheim – Art Addict offers a rare look into Guggenheim’s world: blending the abstract, the colorful, the surreal and the salacious, to portray a life that was as complex and unpredictable as the artwork Peggy revered and the artists she pushed forward.

An ex-con finds his plan to go straight foiled by a loan shark who manipulates his target into taking on one last heist.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

Still living at home with his avant-garde actress mother, constantly rejected by art schools, and without a lover, aspiring painter Andrew decides to enter a contest in hopes of winning a six month stay in Kenya. Though things aren't great for Andrew, neither are they wonderful for his lesbian friend Lucy who constantly bickers with her lover Ingrid. Lucy complicates Andrew's life when she introduces him to the suspicious-looking, enigmatic Jerry.

This candid New York love story explores the chaotic 40-year marriage of famed boxing painter Ushio Shinohara and his wife, Noriko. Anxious to shed her role as her overbearing husband's assistant, Noriko finds an identity of her own.

Avery and Peter try to keep the romance alive while renovating the old house they bought and juggling work, but everything takes on a new perspective when they get some news they’ve been hoping for.

A Paris sculptor (Richard Dix) fakes blindness in Los Angeles to recover his blackmailed sister's love letters.

The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.

Heidi, who initially left her small town of Pleasant Valley with the dream of one day becoming a successful painter, has put her own art on hold to excel as an art gallery curator. Now, a week before the gallery’s big Christmas party, she must return home to watch her niece and nephew. She comes face to face with her high school love, Chris, now a teacher, and offers to help him find a new last-minute location for the Christmas dance.

A parable of the missteps of life enacted in the hothouse world of late 1980’s New York, in which the art market and the stock market each boomed, and in process spawned a smorgasbord of “yuppie” delusions which still persist. Anna, a French actress studying in New York, crosses paths with a successful stock-broker, Mark, standing before a Vermeer portrait at the Metropolitan, thence ensues a peculiar romance of missed meanings and connections, with tangential asides to the steaming arts world and stock market, loft-mate conflicts, and, perhaps, love. Wrapped up in their blindered worlds, Anna and Mark deflect away from their chances, leaving at the conclusion the wistful face of Vermeer’s portrait enigmatically asking questions. All the Vermeers in New York is a comedy of manners which, as gently as a Vermeer, looks beneath the skin of this time and place, and of these characters.

Alex despises Modern Art but when he falls in love with an adorable French artist, he understands that the only way to conquer her heart is to pretend he is an artist. He now must win a Modern Art contest in order to win her heart.

When her art museum faces money problems, a conventional curator works with an avant garde artist to develop an unconventional exhibit. She learns to color outside the lines to save the museum and find love.

Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.

The assorted humiliations, disasters and rare triumphs of four very different twenty-something girls: Hannah, an aspiring writer; Marnie, an art gallery assistant and cousins Jessa and Shoshanna.

Beautiful and naïve Maggy Lunel arrives in Paris completely broke. She becomes an artist's model and the toast of Paris, attracting the attention of Picasso-like painter Julien Mistral, an arrogant and selfish man who places his work above everything. Their paths diverge as Mistral's art catches the eye of a rich American woman who becomes his patroness and eventually his wife. During the war years in France, Mistral collaborates with the Nazis in order to continue with his work, a decision that will come back to haunt him years later. In the meantime, Maggy has a daughter named Teddy who grows up and falls in love with Mistral with whom she has a child named Fauve. As Mistral ages, he comes to terms with his selfish past and wartime betrayal through his art, leaving a beautiful legacy for his daughter, Fauve.

Will Freeman lives a charmed existence as the ultimate man-child. After writing a hit song, he was granted a life of free time, free love and freedom from financial woes. He's single, unemployed and loving it. So imagine his surprise when Fiona, a needy single mom and her oddly charming 11-year-old son, Marcus, move in next door and disrupt his perfect world. When Marcus begins dropping by his home unannounced, Will's not so sure about being a kid's new best friend, until, of course, Will discovers that women find single dads irresistible. That changes everything and a deal is struck: Marcus will pretend to be Will's son and, in return, Marcus is allowed to chill at Will's house. Before he realizes it, Will starts to enjoy the visits and even finds himself looking out for the kid. In fact, this newfound friendship may very well teach him a thing or two that he never imagined possible - about himself and caring for others.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole host of assumptions concerning the nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images.

Sister Wendy Beckett, a cloistered nun and Oxford-educated art scholar, takes an art appreciation tour across America, visiting six major art museums in this 6-hours documentary series from PBS.

Andy works at the National Museum in the Dinosaur Gallery with Hatty. After part of an exhibit is damaged or needs replacing, Andy travels back in time to age of Dinosaurs using the Old Museum Clock to find a replacement piece. He encounters many Dinosaurs and other creatures that lived at the same time.

Christianity has produced some of the greatest works of art of all time, in which believers and non-believers alike can explore the great themes of life and death. It is the language in which Leonardo and Michelangelo, Dali and Rembrandt speak to us all about love and suffering, loss and hope. To mark the year 2000, these four programmes, written and presented by Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, London, consider how artists over two millennia have tackled the extraordinarily difficult task of representing Christ. Without contemporary accounts of Jesus' appearance, artists through the ages have been free to create many images of him - images that sometimes reflect the spiritual world of the artist and other times the desires of the patron or the needs of the spectator. Seeing Salvation is a four part series surveying the historical representations of Jesus Christ in Western European art and sculpture over the centuries since Roman Times.

A London talent agency’s employees must scramble to keep their star clients happy and their business afloat after the sudden death of their founder.

Trace the self-destructive fall of Della Howells, Museum Director in her 40s who begins a dangerous relationship with a young man, and descends from a respectable middle-class woman into the criminal underworld of the art world.

Formerly the palace of Czars, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg is now one of the world's largest museums, drawing three and a half million visitors per year. This superbly mastered DVD series is a guided tour of the works in the galleries as well as a compelling lesson in art history. The 540 minute series examines some of the sculptures, paintings, tapestries, and glassware pieces found within the four pavillions, as well as the impressive European-style architecture of the museum itself. Researched and authenticated by the Hermitage Museum and lavishly photographed, the series covers such styles as Classical, Neo-Classical, Baroque, Gothic, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism. As well, it showcases works by such masters as Rodin, Goya, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso. Be captivated by the history and culture of this breath taking collection of visual art masterpieces.

Go offstage and into the galleries with music at the North Carolina Museum of Art! This series showcases a diversity of North Carolina bands that represent the state’s rich musical landscape.

After he's shot in 1968, Andy Warhol begins documenting his life and feelings. Those diaries, and this series, reveal the secrets behind his persona.

Seven up-and-coming artists create original pieces that explore social issues for the chance to win $100,000 and show their work at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in this competition series judged by art-world insiders.

Author and critic John Mason Brown, who once commented that "some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes," offered this intellectual alternative in 1948-1949. It consisted of an informal living-room discussion on the arts with two or three guests, of the caliber of author James Michener, producer Billy Rose, publishrer Bennet Cerf, and critic Bosley Crowther. The subjects ranged from modern art to new novels, films, the theater and fashions.