Director: Banksy (sort of)
Score: 8/10
Spot The Joke
-or-
In Which Your Reviewer Waxes Poetic On The Nature Of Art
Exit Through The Gift Shop is a film that I finally saw for the first time, despite knowing it by reputation for years now. Even if you aren’t familiar with the reclusive street artist known as Banksy, you know his art, and you almost certainly know his name. He’s one of the most iconic non-faces to ever meet the artistic scene, and his exploits blur the line between art, satire, social commentary, and gigantic social engineering prank-fest. His reluctance to be seen or known is as famous as his tags, which makes this documentary a bit out of left field.
The problem in reviewing this documentary lies entirely in how much you believe in it.
If you take everything at face value, then Exit is one of the most honest and subversive documentaries in history, in addition to being one of the best-made and most entertaining. It follows a bizarre French filmmaker-turned-street artist named Thierry Guetta, a man whose look, mannerisms, and outrageous naivete towards art would rival even the likes of Tommy Wiseau. His compulsive habit (and I do not use the term lightly) of filming everything he sees turns golden when he stumbles into the world of street art and becomes the sole documentarian of one of the most secretive art movements in history. Upon the art turning into a commercial success, Banksy approaches Thierry about creating a documentary that would truly show street art for what it is and the messages it tries to spread—but the result is so abhorrent and incomprehensible that Banksy effectively steals Thierry’s film while he’s out money-printing his way to fame and fortune as a big-time art dealer and creates the documentary about Thierry instead.
The major problem with this is that Banksy is a well-known subversive, who revels in using irony and back-biting sarcasm to mock his targets. It’s this knowledge that effectively leans me into the camp that sees Exit as—perhaps—the greatest satire in film history. If true, this means that Banksy set up the character of Guetta, enlisted his friends to make a false narrative and an entire art exhibition out of scratch, and hoodwinked all of the art world with barely a wave of his hand.
It all comes down to how badly you fear being caught out of the joke when the cards fall. If you take the story at face value, then you get a documentary about how easily art can be faked. It’s a story that explains in excruciatingly poignant detail why everyone hates having their little brother tagging around after them: it’s not that you hate him, it’s that you can’t really have fun doing what you do when you know that in the back of your mind, your little brother is going to screw everything up, and you’re going to have to cover for him as the fun ends for everyone else. However, if you believe that the documentary is in fact a mockumentary, then you risk being the joke in yet another of Banksy’s social experiments, running circles around yourself trying to glean more meaning from art than is actually there.
Personally, I find it all slightly too much to believe—and yet I can absolutely see it all happening for real. When you see the most uninspired, cynical, and derivative photos selling for millions upon millions in fine art auction houses, you realize that Exit really is only a fake documentary for the fact that it came out a few years too early to be true.
Maybe the joke really is on all of us. Banksy has certainly shown no reluctance to put himself into the sights of his own jokes before, especially as he’s achieved commercial success in a medium that despises commercialism itself. It’s an odd paradox, which might just be the brilliance of the whole thing, really. In the film, one of the artists really lays it all out very well, when he says that “The more important [the repeated artistic motif] seems, the more people wanna know what it is, and it gains real power from perceived power.”
Despite it all, the film really does beg some major questions that any critic, art lover, or artist must at some point answer for themselves. Can a true artist ever make a living off of his art? Does street art really achieve its end goals, or do street artists even have a goal to begin with? Just what is art, anyway?
I’ve never actually been a fan of Banksy’s art, if I’m being perfectly honest. If you ask me (and since you’re reading this, I assume you do), I find street art to be in a very hard-to-define category. I don’t really consider most of it art, in the Justice-Potter-Stewart-I-know-it-when-I-see-it sort of way. To me, art is an interaction between the artist and the viewer. In the same way that you can’t have a one-sided dialogue, art has to have an idea, and it has to convey that idea. Street art wavers in most cases between True Art Is Incomprehensible and outright Propaganda, both of which I despise with all my being. If your audience can not interpret the meaning behind your work on their own merits (and without you explicitly spelling it out for them and/or beating them over the head with it), then you have failed as an artist. Even Banksy himself wavers across lines for me, existing as he does mainly on shock value to attempt to scare his viewers into thinking.
The Shamalayan-esque twist, however, is that Exit Through The Gift Shop might be better at delivering a message about art than even Banksy himself is. Banksy has (or had, at least) reached a point where his name might have just been shouting out his own message, and taking a step back behind the guise of Exit might have given him just enough distance to let us all have a moment to think about art and what it can—and should—be for all of us.
Acting: 7
Story: n/a
Visuals: 7
Sound: 6
Enjoyment: 9
Overall Score: 8/10
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