Exit Through the Gift Shop

You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful. All you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.

—Banksy

A month or so ago I learned that Exit Through the Gift Shop, a film purportedly by Banksy, the infamous "street artist," would be coming to the movie theater at which I worked. A movie poster did not tip me off, as would typically happen; I was simply informed by a fellow employee. Typically, by the time a movie has made its run, two or three posters are left in its wake and divvied up to whichever employee wants them, or they are kept in a big box upstairs and, when the unwanted collection becomes too unwieldy, are thrown away. Not until the arrival of the film itself did we receive a poster, and I hold no expectation of adding it to my collection of prized two-dimensional objects. At first I was disappointed by this: why should the paranoid control of his work and its resting place disallow little ol' me the satisfaction of taking home a poster I actually want? However, I realize, it is the ultimate concern of those who work illegally and, by consequence, anonymously in the great public spaces of society: what I do will not last and therefore I may decide precisely where it will cease it to be, and know that no one may possess it. I ultimately realized that under no circumstances would I have gotten this poster; someone further within the theater's inner circle would have had first dibs, or even the owner could have made a call from Malibu, framed it, and sold it for thousands of dollars. Perhaps Banksy's instructions are to burn the poster in the Custom House Plaza at the midnight moment of the end of the film's run. I don't know and I haven't asked my boss. All I do know is that the movie and its maker have unorthodox views on the economics and tied-up meaning of art and its objects, and, that, the other day, when I finally saw the movie, I had a better understanding of both the poster business, and the legacy of this turn of the millennium "street art" phenomenon as depicted in the movie.

What I mean by putting "street art" in quotes is that it seems fundamentally misunderstanding of the movement to define its work as distinct from typically-conceived art, which one rarely refers to as "museum art." Installing a work, for example, in Disneyland or on the Palestinian side of Israel's gigantic wall, has very little to do with any literal street; Thunder Mountain for example is surrounded by walkways, roller coasters, then the parking lot, and then the parking lots of hotels; the idea of "wall" as the Israelis have conceived it is the precise antithesis to the free flow of life that a street embodies. For the purposes of referring to a certain phenomenon, which Banksy refers to humbly and with a certain irony as vandalism, I use the two words; the quotes refer to a reluctance to remove the film's spirit, and the spirit of the pieces it documents, from from a tradition that has less to do the popular understanding of graffiti, and more to do with the 1920s avant-garde, Marcel Duchamp, and the anti-bourgeois spirit of Dadaism: a closing protest to the horrors of the 20th century.

The day I decided to see the movie, it started at 4:50, 7:00, and 9:15, and I worked at six until the theater was close at 10:30 or so. I saw the first hour before I worked and calculated I would need to see 15 minutes of the next showing to bridge the gap between the beginning and the end that I would watch at 10:30. I therefore saw, before work, in the first sitting, Thierry Guetta's fondness of video-taping and his inundation in the world of "street art," his befriending of Banksy, and his attempt at making a film about the street art movement; in the second sitting, during my break, I saw Guetta—now "Mr. Brainwash," himself a "street artist"—prepare a show in Los Angeles while Banksy re-edited the material into a more coherent film; and after work I saw the incredible success of the talentless (in terms of artistic craft) Mr. Brainwash (MBW)'s premier event of works that were hardly conceived by him, mere appropriations of works that are themselves appropriations, and literally were not produced by him, but made by a team of young artists trained in the arts of sculpture, painting, stenciling, etc. I departed into the evening at about 11 or so with the people to whom I had sold tickets and popcorn, with "Tonight the Streets Are Ours" joyously echoing in my head, and an eye suddenly trained to spot locations suitable for vandalism.

The movie manages to create, by the end, a feeling of coherence, of a funny story that has successfully been told; however, it is a film of ideas, where people become their philosophies and these ideas thus interact as people do; and, since it is a film with two filmmakers, and these filmmakers are the two main characters, the very creation and purpose of the film becomes, beyond literally being about the making of the film, the struggle between two theoretical oppositional ideas interacting as living entities; once the story is re-examined as such the film becomes contradictory and confounding. What is so interesting is that Banksy seems to relish this supposed ambiguity when he should in stead be relishing the brilliant satiric difference he has made between himself and a commercially successful artist, justifying himself as superior to the bourgeois hypocrisy of selling street art; so, whenever Banksy is guilty of this very act, he manages it with a self-consciousness, he is exonerated by irony; his patrons are the butts of his joke. To let himself get away with that would be the true crime; and Banksy intends not to get caught, and through this feeling of uncertainty, he intends to escape suspicion entirely.

Once the movie peaks with the ironic success of MBW's million-dollar success, it becomes a montage of critics and artists that were interviewed for the film trying to create meaning out of what, in the narrative created by the film (considered by many as a constructed hoax), became a big joke. And most aptly a friend of Banksy decries, "I don't know who the joke's on. I don't even really know if there is a joke." Banksy and his film editors want us left with a sense of ambiguity, and indeed many left theorizing the unrealities "documented" by the film, though beneath this supposed misdirection there is very clear thesis purported by the story: art is ephemeral and should work against all attempts at its capture. Thierry Guetta enters the museum of street art in its notorious peak at the turn of the millennium, pays his visit, and departs with commercial profit, not enlightened inspiration, on his mind. His art is the equivalent to mugs with Starry Night sprayed on them: he internalized the oeuvre of the greats and figured out a way to sell it to the masses. May we all delight in the irony as we hear an Englishman croon, "These lights in our hearts tell no lies."

This is too easy, however. Banksy is not the hero of the film; with his technologically modulated voice and shadowed face, his unrelenting insistence upon the ideology of "street art," and the place of power in which he places himself within, what we must remember is, his own movie—considering the overall aesthetic of our supposedly favored protagonist—Banksy comes off more as a Darth Vader with the lovable Thierry cast as the naive, up-and-coming Luke Skywalker.

Exit through the Gift Shop

The Empire Strikes Back

In this analogy, learning to use the force and remaining humble and respectful of one's Jedi powers is essential to one's artistic credibility—commercial success is the Dark Side, an unwise thirst for power. By episode four—our introduction to Luke Skywalker—the Jedi are nearly extinct; and the tradition of Dada, the understanding of its practice, is nearly as dead as the men with whom it is associated. As Banksy would have us see it, Thierry abandoned the ideals of the movement by never wanting to show the process, the essence, of the artists—he just wanted to meet famous people—and he fully proves his dissent from his initial hopeful self, as Anakin became Darth Vader, by becoming Mr. Brainwash, an absurdly successful joke, who—like Anakin, by wanting too much too soon, without wanting to hone his understanding of the force—becomes evil. Mr. Brainwash physically is different from Thierry in that, due to an accident in the installation of his show, he is in a wheelchair for the last third of the film; Anakin analagously transforms after becoming deformed in a volcano. The disturbing, frenetic minute that became Thierry's edit of the film gives us a view into the epic mental chaos that defined the intellectual monster he was to become.

But were Thierry's intentions really so impure? Does prematurely lusting for power and perversely succeeding destroy his credibility? Are we really to believe this lovable buffoon is the film's implied villain? I think the film's tagline, "the world's first street art disaster movie," brings us closer to the truth: that Banksy—by agreeing to let Thierry film him making his work, by making him a literal accomplice in his acts of vandalism, by believing that Thierry's film would document and vindicate the movement, by the very act of making the film and thus proving his superior power—shares the role of the villain; though Banksy, like the more conniving, hip-to-irony Spy, is victorious.

—Antonio Prohías