Gallery of errors

One artist positions taxidermy animals in repulsive arrangements. Another simply places common office supplies — such as thumbtacks and paper clips — on austere gallery walls, identifying the objects with Post-it notes, waiting for critics to pontificate about the "existential" nature of the work, pared down to its "essence" of everyday banality.

With Art Basel Miami Beach just a month away, the artists of director Jonathan Parker's new film, (Untitled), may seem less like caricatures of pretentious post-post-postmodern installation artists and more like the Real McCoys poised to promote their puzzling tableaux at the Miami Beach Convention Center. If it accomplishes anything, Parker's low-budget satire understands the modern art world, offering a sendup that effectively skewers multiple intellectual art movements and the people who drive them.

Problem is, the film accomplishes little else, becoming a laborious, thin-plotted and self-satisfied movie whose characters have as much emotional resonance as the hollow artworks that hang in the humorless galleries. Set in Manhattan's Chelsea district — where else? — the film stars Adam Goldberg

as Adrian Jacobs, a dour avant-garde composer whose band plays atonal auditory assaults to empty theaters. His brother Josh (Eion Bailey), meanwhile, makes a fortune on vacuous abstract canvases sold to hotels and businesses. "More people will see this than if it was hanging in MoMA," he says with pride.

Both men have a working relationship — while pursuing a romantic one — with Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton of Grindhouse), the very haute and very hot owner of the gallery whose exhibited artists include the aforementioned taxidermy guy (Vinnie Jones) and the Post-it-note guy (Ptolemy Slocum). Their work isn't the kind that is likely to fly off the walls, so she funds the space with Josh's New Agey abstracts, sold from the bowels of the gallery's back room of shame.

Josh eventually desires to be a front-room artist, but it's the brooding Adrian who most interests Madeleine, intellectually and sexually. She sees something in his shambling sound collages of crinkled newspapers, kicked buckets and discordant clarinets, eventually luring moneyed patron Porter Canby (Zak Orth) into commissioning a piece for Adrian to debut at the gallery.

The cruxes of Parker and Catherine di Napoli's screenplay are its ostensibly brainy debates about the nature of art vs. commerce and experimental art vs. experimental music, but it's all just pseudo-philosophical logorrhea spewed by modern-art mannequins protracting a leaden 96-minute running time. The more it drags on, the fewer ideas the movie contains. (Untitled) is an amusing short film stretched insufferably to a feature, and its hip cynicism toward all forms of artistic expression — from Josh's vapid prints to Adrian's convention-shattering symphonies — discourages creative rule-breaking as much as commercial conformity. It brings to mind Stephen Colbert's on-air mockery of John Zorn a few years ago, a hilarious but cringe-worthy bit that paints even the finest avant-garde music as inept and inscrutable.

Some of the film's targets are inarguably spot-on, its characters certainly existing in the elitist art world. There are many amusing set pieces, such as the layout of Porter Canby's house, where even such functional furniture as the coffee table and toilet are transformed into art installations.

But ultimately, (Untitled) is a case of filmmakers throwing stones from glass arthouses. Shot with direct-to-video indistinction, Parker films his satire with artless anonymity, an important irony for a film that so snarkily criticizes all forms of art.

(Untitled) will open Nov. 13. Contact John Thomason at jpthomason@tribune.com.