“Why don’t we like people who make contemporary art?” I asked myself while watching Velvet Buzzsaw, a horror movie about the art world. In the film, vengeful artworks murder, disembowel and decapitate people from this milieu. Blood flows from curators and aspiring artists, from authoritative critics and influential gallery owners, and even their ambitious assistants. Do we show any mercy? No, for the inhabitants of the art world there is no mercy. The viewer watches the slaughter of this pretentious company with a vicious satisfaction. Even I – though as a critic and curator I would make a perfect target – caught myself failing to feel sympathy for my colleagues (albeit fictional ones).

Velvet Buzzsaw was called to my attention by Agata Pyzik, an intellectual, writer and commentator; an exceptionally incisive person. You can scare yourself to death much better with other horror films, but you won’t see the art world portrayed anywhere else. Films on this subject are rare birds. By the way, it’s intriguing, or actually typical, that when one of these birds flies onto the screen, it’s only to circle over a battlefield littered with the corpses of art people, killed off by malicious scriptwriters.

Contemporary art was once a