There is a scene about halfway through Exit Through the Gift Shop in which notorious street artist Banksy shows filmmaker Thierry Guetta to the loft above his studio. He pulls a dusty cardboard box off of a shelf and pulls out a stack of bills–British pounds with Princess Diana’s head where the Queen’s should be. “We printed a million pounds worth,” he tells Guetta, motioning toward more boxes. He had planned to throw it all into the street, but decided against it when his funny money was used successfully to buy beer at a festival. Nobody even noticed the change. “So I thought, ‘Holy shit,’” Banksy tells Guetta. “We just forged a million pounds.”
This scene illustrates the essential paradox facing street art, one that Exit Through the Gift Shop movie is constantly grappling with. Even though the movement started as an underground means of illegal expression, it has reached such celebrity status in the art world that its top practitioners can, literally and figuratively, make money. And nobody appears very comfortable with that.
But Exit Through the Gift Shop doesn’t start here, at what may be the end. It starts somewhere in the middle of the movement. Billed as “The world’s first Street Art disaster movie,” Exit follows Thierry Guetta, a French born Los Angeles man obsessed with filming. Thierry has no particular goal other than to keep the camera rolling, until on a trip to France he discovers that his cousin is the prominent street artist Invader. He becomes so enraptured with street art—the creativity, the rebellion, the danger—that he seeks out other artists around the world, documenting the movement.
So Guetta finds himself embedded among the artists who are like streetwise superheroes climbing darkened urban rooftops, and is happy. Then Banksy explodes onto the scene and gives him a mission: Find Banksy, the enigma. The man who stenciled the wall in Gaza. The man who snuck his own paintings into MoMA. Guetta sets out to find the notoriously secretive man who single handedly brought street art into the mainstream.
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And he finds him. That’s no secret. What’s most interesting about this film is that, although it started as Guetta’s semi-conscious effort to record everything, the finished product is entirely Banksy’s. He appropriates the project and turns the camera back on Guetta, who loses himself to the world of street art and transitions from documentarian to participant.
But for all its focus on Guetta, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and a slew of other notable artists, the film is never meant to be about any of them. It’s about the art, and the perilous position it finds itself in today. The tension is strong, and the key figures feel it. How can they maintain integrity in a movement which was born from street graffiti, when Shepard Fairey is now most widely known for creating the Obama “Hope” image and Brad Pitt will show up at a “guerrilla” Banksy show? In the film’s final act, Exit takes a sort of cock-eyed view of the state of street art today. It would be so easy to sneer at its popularization, if only it weren’t the genres biggest innovators who had popularized it.
Since its release, Exit has been surrounded by wild speculation. Maybe Guetta is really just a character created by Banksy. Maybe it’s a giant send-up of the art community. My answer: Who gives a shit? Approach it like a tag on the wall or a message on the sidewalk. Enjoy it for what it is. Let it speak to you or don’t, and then move on. (https://www.phillipscorp.com) After all, it’s only a matter of time before it gets sprayed over.
