Exit Through The Gift Shop

“Exit Through The Gift Shop” is a documentary following the evolution and impact of graffiti through the eyes of an amateur filmmaker, Thierry Guetta.  He began by wanting to meet someone he idolized, Banksy, a famous street artist known around the world by his eclectic, extreme and even controversial pieces.  Guetta started out following Banksy around while he created his pieces.  Catching the process of creating street art was Guetta’s goal and he ended up traveling the world with Banksy and accumulating a lot of footage.  After Banksy, many other street artists agreed to participate in Guetta’s documentary.  These street artists included other well known graffiti artisits, Shepard Fairey and Invader.  After Guetta accumulates a lot of film, Banksy convinces him to attempt to put everything together and make a movie.  This is a fail; the final product is very choppy and seems as if the viewer keeps changing the channel every 7 seconds.  There is no story line or fluidity to it.  Once Guetta realizes this project is a fail, the camera is flipped on him and Banksy begins to film Thierry’s journey or evolving into a street artist himself.  Thierry then names himself Mr. Brainwash as his “tag.”  The film ends up evolving into something completely different than what Guetta set out for it to turn into. 

            Thierry Guetta’s work seemed to me to be far from original.  I had not seen one piece that was original, or even straight from Guetta’s creative mind.  It made me question even if he was a creative person.  He was unable to put together the simplest of film footage to tell a story of the infamous Banksy and how he went about creating his work.  Weather it was taking the famous piece of art work American Gothic and putting gas masks on the famous painting, or simply using Andy Warhol’s signature style only manipulating someone else’s face with different, crazy colors.  Along with his lack of originality, it also seems as if Guetta does not even do much of his work.  He had hired a team of people to bring a lot of his work to life.  He may have been hands on with some of his projects, but he also seemed to not care about being open about the fact that his team did mostly everything for him.  Without a lot of his workers, it seemed as if his first art show would not have happened.  It seems very hypocritical because to be a “street artist” you need to be very original and creative and then he aspires to be a big, famous artist yet he does not do any of the work himself.

            After reading two of the articles that had seemed to believe that the whole movie must be a spoof and really all of the “actors” are trying to relay a message regarding originality within street art.  If some of those speculations are true, it makes more sense then the actual movie does.  If Banksy is really “Thierry Guetta” it would make sense because all he wants people to take from the movie is to see the unoriginality of all of Guetta’s pieces of work.  Street art is not easy, it is an expression of one’s emotions, beliefs or interests but it does take some creativeness and all Guetta did in the film, was take commercialized art pieces, that are already famous, and tweaked them or simply splattered paint on top of these printed images and put them all around his gallery.