The world of high-end auction houses has never seemed so sinister. But when the stakes are high and the lots sell for millions – it’s all to easy to believe that behind the scenes, a world of intrigue, deception and seduction exists to ensure that competing auctioneers offer the most alluring and valuable of works are in their hands.Such is the premise of “The Art of More,” a ten episode TV show released all at once on November 19 on Crackle, a Sony Pictures Television-owned site best known for 2012 web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” by Jerry Seinfeld. With an impressive cast including Dennis Quaid as a Donald Trump-lite real estate billionaire named Samuel Brukner, and Kate Bosworth as femme fatale account executive Roxanna Whitman, the set-up each episode revolves around a particularly valuable item and how it came to auction.In opener “Heavy Lies the Head” we follow the story of a stolen artifact of Pete Townshend from a rock memorabilia auction, and are shown how the world of smuggling is very much alive. Episode two follows with an alternative route to auction, telling the tale of how when “an account” comes up, in this case a hoard of gold coins found in a backyard, fierce competition begins to capture the lot.“There’s nothing out there like this,” said Cary Elwes, who plays art collector Arthur Davenport, at the show’s Los Angeles premiere. “No one’s tapped into this world before. And when one thinks of auction houses, you don’t necessarily think of drama. But when millions of dollars are exchanging hands in a nanosecond, much like Wall Street, you can imagine people get involved with nefarious things.”And though this is Crackle’s first TV drama, it seems it didn’t take much to convince Quaid to sign up. “It's like a renaissance,” he said. “What is going on in television right now reminds me of what was going on in movies back in the 1970s where you felt like the inmates had taken over the asylum. There is all this original new stuff.” He and the show may have inadvertently lucked out too. “We were shooting six weeks before [Trump] announced he was running, and then it was… fantastic,” the actor says of the similarity of his character to the presidential candidate. “How are you going to dodge that?”Central to the series is former soldier Graham Connor, an Iraq war vet played by Christian Cooke, whose smuggling ring connects the character to the most ambitious and competitive of art collectors, via auction house Parke-Mason. The actor has revealed that so intense were his own scenes, that while attempting to break a table, he broke his own hand. “I almost passed out, went straight to the hospital to have it put in a cast,” said Cooke. “Luckily, I had it re-broken and got away with it. We shot around it for a few days.”As a pitch, “The Art of More” would seem to have all the right parts then, a blend of secrecy, intrigue, high stakes and power play. But as the show moves from how one lot came to be, and on to the next, the characters surrounding them quickly seem a touch too clichéd. Such self-centred people probably do all exist in the real world of art sales, and that alone makes the show a real insight for those unfamiliar with how auction houses work. But combined, the cast never seems to really gel in a way that causes us to invest in any particular character, making it a fascinating for art fans, but less so for TV drama fans.“The Art is More” can be streamed via Roku, Apple TV, PlayStation, Xbox and Android and iOS devices
↧