The Gallerist, a new film by Cathy Yan set for release this December, takes place almost entirely inside a contemporary art gallery. This isn’t a film in which the art market lingers as a B-plot—the entire story floats within the white cube universe, with references to Matthew Marks, Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and Maurizio Cattelan.
Even the film’s outrageous conceit—purposefully over-the-top, as this is a very campy satire—is rooted in truth. In The Gallerist, an influencer slips and gets impaled on a sculpture.
The dealer incorporates the dead body into the work, and everybody just assumes it’s art.
This happened, sort of, in real life. In the halls of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2015, a woman plunged an X-Acto knife into the neck of a fairgoer, yelling , “I had to kill her and two more” and “I had to watch her bleed!”
But people just walked by, thinking the stabbing was part of the show.
“A guy walked up to me and said, ‘I thought I saw a performance, and I thought it was fake blood, but it was real blood,’” an artist on the scene told the Miami Herald . The fairgoer’s injuries were reportedly not life-threatening.
There’s been an unusual glut of art-world-set movies that have gotten wide release in recent years. In addition to The Gallerist, 2026 has seen the debuts of I Want Your Sex, Gregg Araki’s farce about the Los Angeles art world, and The Christophers, in which Ian McKellen plays an aging artist who bonds with the young painter hired to forge his own works.
The Drama ’s few scenes around Robert Pattinson’s job as a curator at the fictional Cambridge Art Museum feel spot-on—but director Kristoffer Borgli goes one step further by having his apartment stuffed with canvases by Lucy Bull, Tristan Unrau, and Sara Cwynar. Next year, we’ll get Michael B.
Jordan’s The Thomas Crown Affair, in which the master thief once again orchestrates a painting heist—but this time with a Kerry James Marshall masterwork among the canvases stolen.
Most of these films are broad satires, stories that seem to assume what the public really wants is a skewering of both avant-garde artists and their despicable collectors. But are any of them actually good movies, or at the very least true to the world they portray?