Late. Late. Late, late, late. As always, we’re late on this. Well, actually, that’s subjective: If you’re in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, D.C., Austin, Chicago, or the Greater Tri-State Area, we’re a good year late. If you’re in the rest of the country, we’re right on time. And if you’re in Mississippi, we’re eight years ahead of schedule. For you, Jed, we’re delivering news from 2019. Runtell your Unclebrothers and Sisterdaughters.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is Banksy’s feature filmmaking debut, and he remains true to iconoclastic form: Famous for his bold, rebellious street art and legalities-driven obsession with anonymity, Banksy has made his name — and, more recently, growing fortune — by undermining institution. And the movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010, certainly excels in this regard, and on multiple levels.
First, though, a thorough, semi-spoiler (!!!) synopsis for the uninitiated: Exit is essentially a profile of Thierry Guetta, an excitable, thirtysomething Frenchman with no discernible job, a lovely and supportive family, and a habit, rooted in childhood trauma, of videotaping everything lest he forget anything. Guetta’s cousin, the film asserts, is the prominent street artist whose nom de guerre, “Invader,” is derived from the mosaics he epoxies to the sides of buildings in cities worldwide — works inspired by the heavily pixelated classic video game “Space Invaders.” Guetta follows and videotapes this cousin as he and other street artists decorate the walls of Paris, London, and other European locales before eventually landing in Los Angeles. Guetta’s big break comes when he meets up with Shepard Fairey in an L.A. Kinko’s (Invader is “sick” and thereafter more or less absent from the film) and convinces the RISD alum to let him shadow him; before long, Guetta has proven his mettle to Fairey as both a documenter and accomplice, and the unlikely pair sets off on a trans-continental spree of rooftop stenciling, scaffold wheatpasting, and cop-ducking.
However, for all Guetta’s happenstance success in videography — the courageous and innovative vandalistic exploits captured in Exit are many, and much of the footage is breathtaking — the film’s protagonist is never sated. Guetta is portrayed throughout as more or less ignorant of the genre’s major players and their oeuvres, yet for reasons only cursorily clarified in the film (personable guy, trusted accessory, charming accent, “eccentric” facial hair?), he’s fully cleared to tape their illegal nocturnal (and occasionally diurnal) forays. Never star-struck (because he doesn’t know who the stars are), Guetta is nevertheless entranced by the thrill of street art, and for a brief time, he seems relatively fulfilled — that is, until somebody clues him onto the existence of Banksy, the Zeus of contemporary graf-culture mythology.
Guetta immediately and inexplicably develops an obsession with meeting and taping Banksy, and — wouldn’t you know it — through another brilliant stroke of luck, he eventually succeeds. As with Fairey, Guetta rapidly gains Banksy’s trust, and the two jet around together for a while until Banksy suggests that Guetta, y’know, do something with the reams of potentially groundbreaking tapes he has amassed. Guetta returns to L.A. — where his patient wife continues to raise their small children and, apparently, live off somebody’s trust fund — and produces what Banksy deems “an hour and a half of unwatchable nightmare trailers — essentially like someone with a short attention span and a remote control flicking through a cable box of 900 channels. I told him I hadn’t seen anything like it, and I wasn’t lying about that.”
Banksy, sensing that he himself needed to take control of Guetta’s documentary, suggests his faithful sycophant (who has by then begun stickering the Southland with his own likeness) “put up some more of (Guetta’s) posters and make some art, you know, have a little show, invite a few people, get some bottles of wine…and off he went to Los Angeles and he left me alone with the tapes.” Guetta, goes the story, embraced Banksy’s diversion to the fullest, renting a studio and emulating Damien Hirst’s practice of employing an (uncredited) army of production artists to churn out his art — a melange of mildly altered works of various other artists, with a heavy Banksian/Warholian flavor — “on a commercial scale.” Operating under the moniker “Mister Brainwash,” Guetta rents the 15,000-square-foot former CBS studio in Hollywood for his grand premier, hires constructions workers, promoters and contract artists for the show, and plasters the region with billboard ads announcing said event through endorsements by Fairey and Banksy. Helped along by an LA Weekly cover preview, the exhibit generates enormous buzz, and thousands show up to investigate — and contribute to — the hype.
Mister Brainwash, the narrator declares, is an overnight success — commercially, that is: The film reports that the show sells nearly $1 million of art by week’s end. As for critical respect? Not so much: As Exit draws to a tidy conclusion, its creators take great lengths to paint Guetta as a charlatan, a huckster whose success lampoons the herd mentality of the contemporary art world (remember, street art was considered an urban blight by the establishment until Basquiat and Haring captured lightning; Banksy’s art now fetches six figures at Christie’s).
Leading the offensive are, curiously, his primary benefactors, whose assessments of their friend and his show are just a tad too tone-perfect: Of Guetta’s instant fame (which, incidentally, really shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the pulse of Los Angeles), Banksy marvels at the fact that “most artists spend years perfecting their craft, finding their style, and Thierry seemed to miss out on all those bits. I mean, there’s no one like Thierry, really, even if his art does look quite a lot like everybody else’s.”
Delving more deeply into one of Guetta’s many obvious influences, Banksy labels him “the rightful anti-Andy Warhol in a way. Andy Warhol made a statement by repeating famous icons until they become meaningless, but he was extremely iconic in the way he did it. But then Thierry…really…made them meaningless.” Face hidden by lighting techniques and a dark hooded sweatshirt, the elusive Brit is essentially apologizing for Guetta’s success by film’s end (“I mean, I always used to encourage everyone I met to make art; I used to think everyone should do it…I don’t really do that so much anymore.”), and vows in the credits to “never again help anyone make a documentary about street art.” Fairey, for his part, maintains that he “had the best intentions” in supporting Guetta’s ambitious effort, but that “even if you have the best intentions, things can go awry.”
The movie runs 86 minutes, and through perhaps 70 of those, the story comes across as plausible, as real — as the documentation of a passionate, relentless and charmed neurotic’s pursuit of a series of tasks for which he was tragicomically unprepared. But the sum of those last scenes — the cutesy quotes, Guetta’s adoption of the John Belushi look as his fame grows, the whimsical French music in the closing montage, the fact that Guetta is shown creating art for only the most fleeting of moments — creates the distinct impression that Exit is an elaborate farce.
Mister Brainwash, mind you, did throw the immense 2008 show depicted in the movie; the signs were all over L.A. And that LA Weekly cover story did, indeed, run. The art really did sell. And Mister Brainwash did, as the movie asserts, receive credit for designing the cover of Madonna’s Celebration in 2009. All of these things happened. But Thierry Guetta was not, in all likelihood, much more than the unassuming and highly entertaining face of the operation.
More plausible is the suspicion, already forwarded by many, that Banksy (with a possible assist from Fairey) created the Mister Brainwash brand with the intent of highlighting the absurdities of art-world hype. Banksy, who, it turns out, is credited as Exit’s director, provides insight into his mentality, if not this theory, when he admits that “I don’t know what (Guetta’s success) means…maybe Thierry was a genius all along. Maybe he got a bit lucky. Maybe art is a bit of a joke.” Fairey, toeing the company line, elaborates on the notion, stating that “I do think that the whole phenomenon of Thierry’s obsession with street art, becoming a street artist, a lot of suckers buying into his show, and him selling expensive art very quickly…anthropologically, sociologically, it’s a fascinating thing to observe, and maybe there’s some things to be learned from it.”
In this sense, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a remarkable achievement, a scathing and insightful indictment of the very industry that props up the film’s makers. In the same vein as Banksy’s “Morons” — a print depicting bidders at a Sotheby’s art auction in London that sold in 2008 at a Sotheby’s art auction in London — and I’m Still Here (Joaquin Phoenix’s prankumentary sendup of celebrity obsession), Exit is, at its core, a criticism of the very audience to whom it strives to appeal, a meta-insult of sorts.
As to the true extent of Thierry Guetta’s involvement with Mister Brainwash — well, that debate just gained an infusion of urgency: Exit is up for an Academy Award as a documentary feature. (The film’s classification as a documentary would clearly be jeopardized should it come to light that Guetta was merely a pawn.)
And while the media analysis and speculation will surely heat up again now that an Oscar’s at stake, it’s Guetta himself whose words, issued just before the credits roll, most aptly sum up the saga: “An artist is not a guy that you see in one show and you can decide who he is…it’s about time. You’ll see in time who I will be. Because with time, you’ll see my creativity. You’ll see if I’m a real artist or not.”
