Exit Through the Gift Shopchallenges the Notion of Art
Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary?
Is there an art-world equivalent of crying wolf? If so, Banksy has probably done it.
Banksy, the pseudonymous British street artist, has built his reputation on stunts — like inserting his ain work amidst the masters' in museums — that taunted the market in which his pieces sold for millions. Only with his latest project, the documentary "Exit Through the Gift Store," he is laboring to convince audiences that he's playing it direct.
The film, which opens on Friday in New York and California, follows Thierry Guetta, an amiable Frenchman who lives in Los Angeles and videotapes everything — or so nosotros're told. When Mr. Guetta and photographic camera eventually tunnel into the world of street art — he was introduced to the scene through a cousin, the Parisian artist Space Invader — his enthusiastic recording melds nicely with the artists' desire to accept their otherwise ephemeral work documented. He captures that scene's luminaries, like Shepard Fairey and Swoon working on rooftops and in alleys under cover of nighttime.
It seems to be a natural fit for a documentary. Only Mr. Guetta's nonstop footage turns out to be unwatched (he has boxes and boxes of unlabeled tapes) and fifty-fifty when he cobbles something together after years of shooting, largely unwatchable. "He was maybe just somebody with mental bug who happened to have a camera," Banksy says in the film.
So Banksy decides to have control of the material himself — or so we're told. Robbed of his camera and prodded by Banksy, Mr. Guetta, meanwhile, morphs into a street artist, inventing an alter ego chosen Mr. Educate and staging an opening exhibition in Los Angeles that turns him into an overnight sensation, all of which is captured in "Exit Through the Gift Shop."
The film itself was a awareness at the Sundance Motion-picture show Festival this year, especially subsequently Banksy works (including stenciled images of a cameraman shooting a blossom) began popping up on storefront walls in Park Urban center, Utah. At the Berlin International Film Festival in February, he chosen a news conference, just to cancel it at the terminal infinitesimal and show a video, in which he appears in shadows, cloaked in a hoodie and with his vocalism disguised, as he does in the picture, to vouch for its veracity.
The thing is, both Banksy and Mr. Guetta are pretty unreliable narrators. The immediate scuttlebutt was that Mr. Guetta either didn't exist at all, that he was in cahoots with Banksy or that he was Banksy himself. Fifty-fifty aficionados of the scene were unsure what to think.
"Is it real?" asked Andrew Michael Ford, the director of the Terminal Rites Gallery in New York and an independent curator who has worked with street artists. "Is it a hoax?" The film, he added, offered and then many circular possibilities that information technology was "tough to comment on it directly."
But everyone involved has vouched for it. "Of course the more I try to say it's all true, the more it sounds like I'grand somehow perpetuating the conspiracy," said Mr. Fairey, a friend of Banksy'due south.
Mr. Guetta did not respond to a asking for comment — though he does seem to exist and to be as idiosyncratic every bit he is in the movie.
"I don't know why so many people take been fooled into thinking this motion-picture show is fake," Banksy, or someone purporting to be he, wrote in an e-mail bulletin from Los Angeles, where the movie had a premiere on Mon dark. "It'south a true story from real footage. Does it bother me people don't believe information technology? I could never have written a script this funny."
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Equally Marc Schiller, the proprietor of the street-art-enthusiast Web site woostercollective.com, put it, "It is one of these cases where Banksy has plant in his fine art that truth is stranger than the all-time fiction yous can imagine."
Both Mr. Schiller and Mr. Fairey said that "Exit Through the Gift Shop" was of a piece with Banksy'south site-specific work, like a guerilla Guantánamo installation at Disneyland and an ersatz pet shop in the West Village.
"Banksy is making a movie that'south 100 pct like a Banksy exhibition," Mr. Schiller said. He called information technology a prank, then corrected himself, labeling it "a Banksy event."
Mr. Fairey, who said that he and Banksy were in the same situation in trying to recover the footage of their career-defining moments from Mr. Guetta, added: "This is a fashion for Banksy to tell his story merely at the same fourth dimension critique the street art miracle. Information technology's perfectly aligned with how he does things. Merely information technology was a very shrewd accommodation to a problem that existed, not something premeditated."
Banksy said it was a stretch to call the motion picture his directorial debut.
"I didn't take the director's credit considering I thought that was a bit unfair," he wrote. "The editors essentially built the whole thing, and I deferred to the producer on the scenes I feature in — otherwise I'd merely take picked the shots where my silhouette looks adept."
Nonetheless, he added, making it was "an all-consuming process, and my vandalism has certainly suffered every bit a result." And Mr. Schiller said that Banksy was "involved in the smallest little detail of every attribute of this production and of the marketing of the film." (Banksy said he financed it himself; new graffiti appeared in Los Angeles for the premiere.)
The surprise, Mr. Ford said, is in how quickly non-art-globe audiences were to have the notion of graffiti as a major spectacle.
"It's one of those things where I'm non quite sure what I'thousand here for, but I'm excited about information technology," a fan in line for Mr. Educate'due south 2008 show, where works sold for tens of thousands — even so far less than Banksy's prices — says in the film.
"Banksy cares very much about selling fine art and what people think of him," Mr. Fairey said, "and he understands thoroughly that people'south fantasy is a far ameliorate marketing tool than reality."
Ultimately, wondering whether "Leave Through the Gift Shop" is real or not may be moot. It certainly asks real questions: about the value of authenticity, financially and aesthetically; about what it means to be a superstar in a subculture congenital on shunning the mainstream; virtually how sensibly that culture judges, and monetizes, talent.
Asked whether a moving picture that takes shots at the commercialization of street fine art would devalue his own work, Banksy wrote: "Information technology seemed plumbing fixtures that a film questioning the art world was paid for with proceeds directly from the fine art world. Peradventure it should have been chosen 'Don't Seize with teeth the Mitt that Feeds You.' "
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/movies/14banksy.html
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