Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

UK, 87 minutes, documentary

Director: Banksy

Music: Geoff Barrow, Richard Hawley

Editors: Banksy, Tom Fulford, Chris King

With: Rhys Ifans, Thierry Guetta (aka Mr. Brainwash), Banksy, Invader, Shepard Fairey, Neckface, Swoon

It's not easy to pin down what this entertaining little picture is, exactly, though all the main problems are caught in the basic question, documentary or mockumentary? It's directed by the notorious street graffiti artist / vandal / political activist / prankster / what-have-you Banksy, still his only feature-length picture. Banksy appears in it sitting for interview with his face hidden and voice distorted. Street artist / etc. Shepard Fairey—most famous now for the iconic Barack Obama "Hope" poster from 2008—also has a role in it, and a very big one, according to the people who believe it is all an elaborate put-on. Exit Through the Gift Shop is working on the story of street art as it was inevitably coopted (if that's what you want to call it) by the privileged art world.

This object lesson is made in the person of Thierry Guetta, a French émigré to Los Angeles. Guetta's biography is that first he was the proprietor of a popular (and expensive) LA vintage clothing store, and then an obsessive with a video camera documenting street art around the world. Eventually, as we see practically real-time, he reinvents himself as an Andy Warhol knockoff pop artist, calling himself MBW, for Mr. Brainwash. He appears to be a genuine person as far as I can tell by internet sources, has seen financial windfalls from his work, and is still working. Madonna really commissioned him to do the cover of her album Celebration. As a pop artist he works in the industrial production style Warhol came to use, hiring graphic designers and other artists to execute his ideas. There is an obvious pop inspiration to Guetta's work but a nagging feeling he may be mediocre and we may be dupes. As a somewhat exasperated Banksy puts it, "His art looks quite a bit like everyone else's."

But is Banksy truly exasperated or is it part of the script? This movie is dogged by questions like that, as often likely intended as not. Many points are murky. The history of street art via clips from Guetta's thousands of hours of video footage is always interesting but feels fatally limited, fragmentary, and peripheral. The history of street art, which itself is necessarily full of put-ons and disguised identities, may only be a prop in this movie. The real focus is Guetta's ridiculous success as someone only impersonating an artist. He's the hoax and this documentary is exposing him. (The contention of conspiracy theorists is that Banksy and Fairey conspired to create Mr. Brainwash in the first place in order to make this picture and it's all a continuing put-on.) 

For his part, Guetta is persuasively and cheerfully convinced of his own value as an artist. But Banksy, as the picture goes on, increasingly is not, and the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves. One successful street art dealer, Steve Lazarides, may have the best word on the situation: "If Thierry can pull it off, then amazing, but you know, it's kind of – I think ... I think the joke is on – I don't know who the joke's on really. I don't even know if there is a joke." Suddenly he seems pensive.

This movie is packed with quotes like that, people losing their way after strong starts on big statements, which is part of why it feels like a hoax. We're used to seeing documentaries clean up and clarify such things with careful editing. Here's Guetta on meeting his street art hero Banksy for the first time: "He was cool. He was – he was human. He was – he was – he was – he was – he is the – you know, he's really like what he represent. You know, he's really, like – I think he's really like – I really liked him!"

Some of it is Guetta's thick French accent but I take Banksy's choice of quotes like that more as throwing shade. My sense is that Banksy was a little embarrassed by his inadvertent participation in creating Mr. Brainwash, who turned into a monster of the commercial fine art world. Exit Through the Gift Shop is his apologia. Banksy is famously skeptical of the fine art world, once selling a piece at auction that self-destructed soon after the bidding was concluded. 

In the end there are a lot of ways to take Exit Through the Gift Shop. Banksy was originally drawn to Guetta because of Guetta's work documenting street art, which of course is ephemeral by definition and thus relies on video and photographic documentation as well as internet distribution to make its points most effectively—and enduringly. As an artist, Guetta, if anything, is more like the conceptual type, with no natural craftsman-like skills, which appears to offend stencil specialist Banksy's sense of how it's done, as perhaps it should. 

Guetta is undisciplined if he is anything. He shot thousands of hours of video footage but never had the patience to go through it systematically. Banksy reserves special contempt for Guetta's own attempt at a film, Life Remote Control, a sample of which is in the picture (and a longer one in DVD extras). Banksy seems to regard it as possibly the worst movie ever made, just a pastiche of a senseless montage. I'm not so sure—I took it at face value and enjoyed its assaultive rhythms and surprise celebrity appearances. I'd like to see the whole thing. But somehow, liking it makes me just a little less confident in my own judgments. If I understand Banksy, I think that's pretty much what he's after with this curiosity.