Exit Through the Gift Shop is the first and perhaps the last movie to be made by the mysterious English street artist Banksy, and although it's partly about himself and his fellow night marauders -- among them Shepard Fairey, now most famous for that ubiquitous red, blue and cream Obama poster, but also the creator of the Andre the Giant sticker campaign of the late 1980s -- there's nothing self-aggrandizing about it. Or perhaps everything about it is self-aggrandizing. The picture strives to capture the spirit and style of street art, and to make a bold statement about its commodification: Banksy's work, in particular, is prized by collectors and fetches high prices in the art market. But if Banksy is getting rich, he doesn't seem to be too happy about it. And so he has framed his film as a rags-to-raggedy riches story in which an enthusiastic street-art fan -- a nutball Frenchman transplanted to Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta -- first becomes a Banksy disciple and then surpasses his teacher, launching a mega-million-dollar art career of his own.
Banksy, born in Bristol in the mid-'70s, is a graffiti artist who, under cover of night, transforms blank walls -- or anything he might choose to use as a canvas, including an old-fashioned red British Telecommunications phone box -- into art. Much of his work consists of elaborate stencils adorned with spray-painted slogans. Those stencils might include crisp, beautifully rendered images of monkeys, rats or people responding to -- and simultaneously becoming a part of -- the urban despair or delight around them. Many of Banksy's sentiments are anti-establishment, anti-capitalist or just plain grumpy, but his work is laced with wit, too: A sign on a bridge warns "Anti-Climb Paint," and yet several Banksy-stenciled mice scramble nimbly around the letters, flaunting any authority that would dare try to control them.
Sometime in the early 2000's Banksy, having recently landed in Los Angeles for a visit, made the acquaintance of Guetta, a wily used-clothing dealer with thick mutton-chop sideburns and an even thicker French accent. Guetta had already earned the trust of Banksy's friend Fairey; he was also the cousin of the French street artist Invader, known for installing colorful Space Invaders images, made from mosaic tiles, throughout Paris. Guetta loved following street artists around with his ever-present video camera, documenting their nightly rounds as they decorated -- or, some might say, desecrated -- public spaces in various cities with stencils, paint and posters. Although Banksy never allows his face to be filmed or photographed -- he appears in Exit only as a shadowy, hooded figure with an electronically altered voice -- he thought it would be OK to allow Guetta to follow him on his nocturnal stealth missions. Guetta, Banksy was led to believe, was working on a documentary about street artists.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is allegedly the result of Banksy's seizing Guetta's endless footage and shaping it into a viable film. And it shows how Guetta became something more, or maybe less, than just a documentary filmmaker, an artist in his own right whose fame threatens to eclipse that of his idol, Banksy. The movie has the feel of an elaborate hoax (a hoaxy?), and it probably is. Is Guetta real, or is he just one of Banksy's more elaborate creations, a walking, talking piece of street art himself? Exit made a modest ripple of bemusement when it played at Sundance and Berlin earlier this year. When I'd ask people who'd seen it what they thought, they'd respond cryptically, "It's fun." Then they'd mutter something like, "I'm not saying I buy it...."
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.