Exit Through the Gift Shop
At a glance...
- Directed by Banksy
- Released in 2010
- Runtime 87 minutes
- Watched at a friend's house
- Final feelings: politically vacuous on every level.
I have historically not been a huge documentary person, so I was pleasantly surprised by just how funny this was. Thierry suits the role of a bumbling clown falling up into success perfectly for this story. And yet, I am left with a nagging skepticism over so much of this movie. Firstly, the film never actually tries pin down why people make street art in any specific way. that's a critical omission for me, because as much as it plays up the increasing stakes of Banksy's artistic escapades, we never get any sense of why he's choosing his subject matter. Painting a window in the apartheid wall in the West Bank and setting up a blow-up doll of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner at Disneyland are deeply political statements, and yet this film doesn't really offer a hint of where anyone's politics lie. Maybe the art is meant to speak for itself, and I think it could when viewed simply as art. But we're watching a movie and we're hearing this voice-changed version of Banksy telling his story through much of this film. Instead of any artistic coherence, Banksy comes across as just an English thrill-seeking bloke who kinda fucks around with remixing whatever big-deal stuff he can think of. As a consequence, all this work becomes colored as just the vain expression of some guy, falling flat of the highs any individual art piece might elicit in isolation.
And then, in light of that, what do we make of Thierry's failing into success at the end? To me, it feels like a self-own on street art, at least through the lens of this movie. If even the most prolific and mysterious street artist is just kinda winging it and riffing on hardcore subject matter and putting it on the street with no coherent politics to articulate about why he makes the artistic choices he makes, how is Thierry doing anything different? Yes, the capture of street art in the art establishment is a reason why we should mock the art establishment and dismiss it as the money-laundering prestige farming bullshit that it is, but maybe street art (or the street art of this film) deserves some of our scrutiny as well.
Maybe I am predisposed to skepticism. I have never been particularly interested in Banksy's art. But I think this movie is just a little incoherent when viewed as a whole. Also, I kept thinking about F For Fake while watching this movie. It doesn't cover the exact same things, but I think it's a much better exploration of the commodification of art and the boundaries that exist to separate "real" art from "fake" art.