Exit Through the Gift Shop

I'm going to share with you now the secret reason I prefer film above all other arts.

It is an essentially fixed price medium whose perceived value does not fluctuate with the winds of the pretentious and the cliquish.

Music is no slave to these airs either but it is increasingly difficult to label anything that Madonna, 50 Cent or Hall & Oates succeed at as art.

Indeed.

Film stands alone in matters of "bang" for the artistic buck. Worth of the product is regulated more by the tastes of the common unwashed or the obsessive nature of the cineaste than some fashionable cabal of snoots dictating discriminatory pricing practices.

You'll always be able to get a copy of Citizen Kane or Raging Bull for around $10, no matter if Orson Welles' name becomes more heralded in the future or whether Martin Scorsese suddenly decides to stop making movies or drops dead entirely. The everyman can own and screen a copy of these masterpieces whenever he likes. Some douchebag with an Edward Hopper reprint, framed at the local mall, is seen in a slightly less glowing light. Plus, he probably got robbed on the cost of poster framing.

It is well and good that movies work this way commercially. It is particularly fine and dandy for a film snob like myself. If the amassing of a DVD library had the same wallet-emptying stigma that gallery art collection involves, I would have turned to crime long ago.

Imagine if the works of Chaplin, Huston, Hawks, Ford, Ozu, Bergman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Truffaut or Lynch were priced accordingly to the mainstream fodder churned out for the visually, emotionally and mentally impaired. You could still score a copy of any Adam Sandler movie for around $6 (Punch Drunk Love would run you $12) but you'd have to take out a second mortgage to own a copy of any Coen Brothers film. And all because a bunch of elitist, condescending pricks like myself deemed it so. Celluloid is celluloid as paint is paint. The art is in the idea and execution. Why should Fassbinder be held in less regard than Cezanne just because plastic disks are more easily duplicated than stretched canvas and some oils?

It's because the wealthy need separation and something with which to lord over us. The culture of control. It is why they initially decried the cinema as a vulgar and common enterprise. Sensing they were losing their discriminatory grip on the arts, they even resorted to shutting down the large tent shows during early film screenings over "safety" concerns (many mysterious fires occurred) to scare away the riffraff who were seeing the future of modern entertainment for a nickel a crack. How were the well-to-do to enjoy (and exploit) the new technology if the street trash could also afford a seat to the show?

Same holds for the fashion industry as well. We should be equally skeptical about laying out excess money for textiles simply from the fear of being hissed at or mocked by prancing, ridiculously garbed pillow-biters catering to Upper Eastsiders. And all because they never had a catch with their Dad.

It is benevolence alone that we film critics stop short of effecting industry pricing and thus resign ourselves to the small pleasures of knowing we are superior to the rubes while scoffing at their boorish cinematic philistinism. Some things are better than money or power. An inflated sense of self-worth is surely one.

All of this segues nicely into a discussion of the latest documentary to shed light on the shallowness and pomposity of the art world; renegade, enigma, street artist Banksy's Exit through the Gift Shop. Who better to deflate this industry's ballooned sense of relevance than the man who has been challenging it by fits and starts for almost two decades now.

Cunning, coy and brilliant - Banksy began as a street artist (his works first appearing in Bristol, England) and slowly - through talent, a unique brand of self-promoting hucksterism, a socially satirical message and a devilishly clever knack for controversy - has carved out an iconic niche for himself (and a nice living) in the very industry he so fiendishly parodies. His art blends graffiti, pop, thought-provoking vandalism, scandal and traditional techniques; all done under a cloak (a hoodie, actually) of anonymity and an alluring sense of mystery. Comparisons to Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel come easy. I liken him more to a masked Andy Kaufman. Especially if Andy is still alive somewhere, watching cartoons and laughing his ass off at all of us.

Zorro and the Pimpernel lacked the cynicism and sense of irony that Andy and Banksy possess.

With Exit through the Gift Shop, a buzz-creator at this year's Sundance, Banksy has struck again with his powers of duplicity in the name of satire. The film begins as a standard documentary on the elusive artist, filmed by a French videophile named Thierry Guetta, who is an obsessive fan of Banksy and of street art in general. He has spent years compiling tape (assisting in the actual process at times) of various street artists from around the world including his cousin, the famed "Invader" from Paris. Thierry apparently can afford this whirlwind lifestyle of filmmaking from the profits of his vintage clothing store in Los Angeles. It is not without irony that his love of pop art (recycled imagery) coincides with his salvaging and resurrection of once iconic garments. And fashion is never too far from other mediums of art; a sentiment that Malcolm McLaren's ghost would surely whisper to Guetta and his punk sensibility.

Thierry's obsession to capture every moment of his life has produced hundreds of tapes and endless hours of footage. All of it unwatched. After coaxing him to make a feature using the footage (an unmitigated disaster), Banksy decided that Thierry would make an infinitely more fascinating subject for a documentary than he would and turned the cameras on the half-crazed, ex-pat Gaul.

With Frankensteinian regret, Banksy realizes he has unleashed a preposterous and insatiable ego onto all of mankind. Thierry assumes the name "Mr. Brainwash" as his nom de spray paint can and sets out to become a street artist in his own right. Emulating his heroes; Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Intruder, et al, his lack of artistry and ideas is obscured by his keen talent for blatant self-promotion. Soon, after having never studied art or having particularly practiced it outside of film camera work, Mr. Brainwash has a front page article in L.A. Weekly and publicity that only money can buy for his upcoming show. Banksy and Fairey reluctantly lent blurbs for the ad promos. Despite a broken foot and production nightmares plaguing the opening, Mr. Brainwash becomes a phenomenal hit; by simply ripping off Warhol and every other pop/dada artist of the past one hundred years.

Banksy is miffed. Viewing the derivative nonsense that his monster has created, he comments that Warhol repeated images to make the point that they become meaningless. He then insists that Mr. Brainwash has succeeded in actually making them meaningless all by himself.

But don't be fooled.

Under the film's title are the words "A Banksy Film".

Which, in essence, means that it is an elaborate hoax. The moniker "Brainwash" may be a hint. As well as him "breaking a leg" before his premiere. Being unbearably French may be another. Thierry Guetta is a character played by an actor portraying an obsessive videographer turned egomaniacal artist. The footage of the street artists shown is actual footage, but filmed by friends of the individual artists and offered to Banksy for the ruse. Mr. Brainwash's gallery show? Quickly assembled pop-art clutter designed to pull a fast one on the industry and its gullible little toadies looking for an intrinsic meaning to their vapid lives and a way to spend their trust funds rapidly on rehashed junk, laughably posturing as "serious" art. The film is Banksy's appreciative twist on Orson Welles' F for Fake. Or maybe Borat.

Then again, the whole thing could just be an interesting documentary on undeserved fame, hubris and the type of willfully ignorant people that P.T. Barnum (or David Hannum) suggested were born every minute.

After all, Sarah Palin has a following, right?

It must be remembered, however, that home-schooled Cheeto-crunchers who pray to Jeebus and clenched urban assholes who gladly pay $7 for a bottle of water don't queue up in separate lines for any enlightenment. They simply piss and moan in different languages about the wait and celebrate mediocrity in whatever form it takes. As long as they see their own reflection in the gimmick.

Caveat emptor.

Author's note: There'd be a quick way to find out if the film is a grand hoodwink. Get an investigative journalist to check out the facts the film purports about Thierry Guetta. There would have to be a paper trail if he was a business owner. I get $2000 a day plus expenses if any of my wealthier readers are interested in the matter. Otherwise, I just don't have the time or resources for luxuries like truth.

Comments

[Lance Lyle]

Dear Professor Highbrow,

Your are so spot the fuck on in this inspired jeremiad!

And by the way, I'm working my way through 'Berlin Alexanderplatz," A shatteringly brilliant piece of work. (Can't remember if you've seen it or not).

And just read a phenomenal book: "Hons & Rebels" by Jessica Mitford. She's was a muckraking journalist and communist, so you should be able to read it without having an ideologically-induced conniption fit. Plus her writing is just so...

Missing you,

Lance

[C. Adolph Moores]

Thank you!
I love being complimented with words that I have to look up at dictionary.com.
And I am a Zocial Demokrat, not a communist.
And Fassbinder is always shatteringly brilliant. Except for maybe Whitey and Pioneers in Ingolstadt. Absolutely insufferable.

[jjmitch21]

Chip,

I finally saw this film a few days ago and loved it. I half-watched it again during a Saturday morning nap. I guess I was hoodwinked. I didn't even consider that "Banksy" might be manipulating us viewers by portraying Thiery as being more successful at producing the "Street Art" when the Frenchman's stuff was obviously rubbish.

Whatever the actual situation, Banksy is the better artist. Did he really put graffiti on the Wailing Wall? That took some serious kiwis!

Fool me once... blah, blah blah! Good for Banksy! Really cool film.

JM