He’s conquered The West Bank, MoMA, The Tate, London Zoo, and Disneyland, but Exit Through The Giftshop is British street artist Banksy’s first foray into the medium of film.
As a documentary, it’s good. Slick, entertaining and insightful. But as a subversive and satirical commentary on the overblown ridiculousness that permeates the art world - the world that has made him into the cultural phenomenon he is - it’s a staggering work of pure fucking genius.
The film is touted as a doco on Banksy that, for reasons explained mid-way through by both Narrator Rhys Ifans and a hooded, shadowy unidentifiable Banksy, morphed into a doco about the filmmaker instead.
That ‘filmmaker’ is Theirry Guetta, an almost certainly certifiably-insane Frenchman-in-LA whose passion for filming street artists like Shephard Fairey and Neckface in the act inexplicably earned him the trust and respect of one of the modern art world’s most elusive beings – Banksy.
Sounds simple enough, except nothing about this film is straightforward. While Banksy is raking in squillions auctioning his work at Sotheby’s, Guetta reinvents himself as the artist ‘Mr Brainwash’ and manages to pull off the most brazen of all ‘stunts’, and taking the art establishment along for the ride.
Without giving the game away, Banksy wants us to believe this Guetta character is real. In interviews since the film premiered at Sundance in January, Shephard Fairey repeatedly assures us that yes, Guetta is not a creation.
This is technically accurate, I suppose. Mr Brainwash’s epic 2008 art show did really happen in LA. But, there are more holes in his back story than there are in a kitchen sponge, which indicates that a very patient Banksy meticulously orchestrated the entire thing, to blur the lines between fiction and fact down the track.
Exit Through The Giftshop is an elaborate hoax of a film - a brilliant pisstake that examines the commercialisation of art, the media’s complicity in perpetuating bullshit, and what it means to sell-out.
See it at The Sydney Film Festival in June. Or wait, patiently, for the inevitable cinema release later in the year. This film is a killer.