White Lies

A young black man pretends he is an art student in order to pick up girls at the Guggenheim Museum. When the attractive - and white - assistant director of a SoHo gallery overhears him, she assumes he is an artist and offers to exhibit his work. He plays along when she suggests how much he could earn from "his" paintings. Within days he's living a double life, paying a formally-trained artist junkie for her rejected works, and falling in love with the assistant director. Things very quickly get way out of hand. This is rather conventional plotting - we've all seen the "double-life with romantic complications" scenario many times before. This film's strength, however, lies in its use of that scenario to critique, quite savagely, both the New York art scene and black/white power relations. It exposes the lies at the heart of both in a very economical and satisfying way.