A day after watching 'Guest of Cindy Sherman' I am left wondering whether it is a very subtle send up of the pretensions of the art world rather than the documentary it purports to be.

OK, I didn't laugh much while viewing but as I recount what happened I am starting to giggle.

The first section tells how Paul H-O ran a very poor New York public access television show about art – 'Gallery Beat'.

The thing ran for years garnering a limited following from the artists who loved the publicity even though Paul's interviewing technique never got beyond total inanity as he would ask people what they had for breakfast that day. Occasionally he gets told the truth, including one bearded critic who rightly tells him his show is "a glib masturbatory exercise in stupidity".

Undeterred he plows on, eventually landing an exceedingly rare interview with art sensation Cindy Sherman who has made a career out of taking pictures of herself dressed up as different characters.

For reasons she must herself now be questioning she falls for his cheesy interview style which consists of variations on the theme of "you look cute in that costume", and "you also look cute in that other costume", etc.

And one time, gazing at her pictures he summons up the incredibly insightful: "They are all projecting some kind of thing about themselves." You think? And thus they all live happily ever after – art wannabe with art talent, right? Wrong.

Annoyingly for Paul, Cindy doesn't pack it all in and join him in failure. No, her career goes from strength to strength, despite taking time to nurse him through a major illness and bail him out of bankruptcy. What a total b*tch!

Back on his feet his starts a new TV show 'Art-like' – he spends months designing the logo but apparently a nano-second thinking up the name. Of course it bombs.

And there are more laughs when he tries to land an interview with British bad boy Damien Hurst, he of dead animal fame, and is granted five minutes by his publicist who adds, seemingly in all seriousness, that Hurst has cancelled a dinner with Madonna and another engagement to free himself up – for five minutes.

And meal dates are integral to Paul's crisis as he leads us to the anti-climax of the film – one day he was invited to an event with Cindy and he wasn't seated next to her but taken to another one with a card saying 'Guest of Cindy Sherman'.

Our Paul wasn't having that and whined himself out his relationship, their shared home and into a glorified hostel. And that, essentially, is it.

This film earned rave reviews from a variety of Big Apple media but it's difficult to see the hook for non-art lovers as it seems manages to tell you more than you wanted to know without explaining itself properly.

For instance we learn at one stage a lot of men were being successful which made them all terribly macho apparently although we are not told why. We don't of course get Cindy's take on the disintegrating relationship – clearly she had more important things to do. Meanwhile Paul H-O seems such a one dimensional idiotic character you almost wonder if his whole life is some grandiose performance art piece taken a bit too far. Probably not though, eh?