Banksy’s debut film, Exit Through The Gift Shop, like most of his graffiti and art-pranks, is designed to reveal the basic vacuity of modern art and the absurdity of artistic institutions.

    Near the start Banksy states that the film was initially going to be by Thierry Guetta and about himself, but it ended up being the other way round.  Judging by Guetta’s disastrous initial foray into documentary making and his on screen charisma, things definitely worked out best this way round.

    Working under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash, Guetta pulled of probably the greatest non-Damien Hirst related scam the art world has ever seen.  Through plagiarism, meaningless juxtapositions of icons, sloganeering and hype, Mr. Brainwash managed to sell over a million dollars worth of his art in a week.  Though the film tries to keep it ambiguous as to whether he intended to scam people or actually took his art very seriously, our introduction to Guetta at the start of the film as a scheister who sells second hand clothes as “designer” pieces at massively inflated prices to idiot fashionistas makes his later “artistic” intentions pretty clear.

    One of the funniest parts of the film is listening to LA’s art community pontificating about the quality of Mr. Brainwashes’ art, apparently ignoring not only the blatant lack of merit but also the irony in thoughtlessly buying into the idea of someone called Mr. Brainwash being an artist before seeing his art.  As the film makes clear though, the most important point is not whether or not his paintings were good or bad, it’s that they sold, a lot, and by the end of his exhibition they had become for better or worse (mainly worse) part of the art establishment. 

    The film itself is witty, irreverent and all the other adjectives that spring to mind when someone says the word Banksy. Exit is enjoyable regardless of how little or much you know about street art or Banksy and runs along at a breathless pace, has plenty of humour and some decent art.  The main attraction of the film though is Guetta, who is a fascinating subject and is always engaging, with his psychedelic broken English non-sequiters being particularly hilarious. 

    Exit is also a great document of an art scene starting half as a joke, then getting progressively more labored and pretentious until ultimately it crosses over into the mainstream as a parody of itself, loosing all meaning in the process.  Street art is meant to be exactly that, on the street, and while it certainly started that way and made cities all over the world slightly less drab places to live in, the scene gradually made its way into the public conscious, and now for better or worse any idiot can buy a can of spray paint and consider themselves an artiste. 

    The main point of the film by the end seems to be that, Banksy doesn’t make art, and neither does anyone else.  That is until someone hangs their work in a gallery, or puts in on a movie screen.  Ooops.  Or was I meant to think that?  Or maybe that? Or this?  Ah who cares, the film was funny, go see it. 

4/5 Stars