Last night, the creme of LA’s street art scene gathered in downtown’s stunningly ornate Los Angeles theater to see the premier of Banksy’s latest buzz-worthy project, a full length film—Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film tracks the creation and meteoric rise of Mr. Brainwash, the street art (artifice) sensation who stunned LA’s art world last year by producing a mammoth show in the old CBS offices in Hollywood. The story line is well known: amateur videographer Thierry Guetta spends a decade videotaping street artists like Shepard Fairy, Invader and Banksy, documenting their own rise within the pop culture zeitgeist. Banksy encourages Thierry to produce his own art show, which becomes a mammoth hit based on the buzz created by his affiliations with the street art elite. The end result is a new “name” artist of questionable talent, and a global art scene questioning its own hype. But how much of the story is fact, and how much is suspect? Banksy’s entire career is based around art as comic gag. Is it beyond him to orchestrate a narrative that confronts the hype befallen himself and his peers in the past few years? Here’s three reasons why Exit Through The Gift Shop might not be what it seems.
