REVIEW: Banksy Plays Truth and Dare in Exit Through the Gift Shop

No one likes to be duped, least of all critic- and journalist-types. But I'm not sure there's anything to "buy" in Exit Through the Gift Shop, other than the idea that exuberance, mischief and surprise all have their place in art. Where's the fun, or the intelligence, in approaching everything with a wide-eyed expectation of the truth? (And if I'm looking at a documentary made -- or even ostensibly made -- by a guy who paints a faux-realistic UFO into a placid Corot-style landscape, I'd better have an idea of what I'm in for.) Banksy may be a raconteur and a rapscallion, but he's a charmer too. At one point in the film he shows Guetta a cache of unnervingly realistic-looking £10 notes bearing the likeness of the late Princess Diana instead of Queen Elizabeth. Banksy tells Guetta that he'd made the bills himself, with the intent of passing them out as art, until he realized they could be too easily spent. "We just forged a million quid!" he says with the propriety of a schoolmaster who's shocked at the behavior of a normally docile student. Even the trickster Banksy has certain lines he will not cross.

Banksy again professes indignation and surprise when, shortly after he's mounted his own controversial Los Angeles show, the 2005 "Barely Legal" -- whose chief feature was a live elephant disguised, with children's face paint, as ornate wallpaper -- Guetta opens a show of his own, filled with a ragtag yard-sale assortment of factory-made, Banksy-lite so-called street art. (The finest of the Guetta pieces on offer, in my estimation, is a matching set of faded Victorian portraits, one male and one female, each subject wearing a Batman mask. Guetta waves the male version in front of the camera, noting that it's dated 1893. "This is Batpoppy, the grandpa of Batman," he informs us authoritatively.) The show, according to Banksy, was a raging financial and critical success.

But unless you happen to have spent good money for Guetta's art -- or even if you have -- it doesn't much matter whether the artist known as Thierry Guetta is real or just a flesh-and-blood Banksy stencil. The chief pleasure of Exit Through the Gift Shop comes from the window it cuts into the artists' process. With street art, process is all-important because the results are so ephemeral: A stencil that might have taken weeks to design, execute and install might be painted over by the authorities practically overnight. And so when Guetta's camera shows us Fairey doing daytime prep work at Kinko's, making jumbo Xeroxes of images that will later become part of a 2-D outdoor colossus, or captures the meticulousness with which Banksy prepares a stencil of an inquisitive-looking rat wielding a paintbrush, it becomes clear that making street art is more than just a brash, illegal act.

Although getting it out there certainly is illegal: Exit Through the Gift Shop opens with a song by the Yorkshire singer-songwriter Richard Hawley whose refrain is, "Tonight, the streets are ours," set against footage of street artists from around the world, joyously spray-painting, papering and postering -- and often running, with the cops at their heels -- in the night. Is this vandalism, or is it art? Neither Banksy's unseen face nor his movie give us the answers, but we'd do well to remember that quick visual of the mice who defied the anti-climb paint. The truth is often slippery, although no amount of signage should stop us from seeking it.

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