Exit Through the Gift Shop [107 points / 10 votes]
"The debates that Exit Through the Gift Shop seems to inspire most are typically ones of veracity: is the film real, a distortion of truth or a complete work of fiction perpetrated by a well-known prankster and cultural terrorist? Is the documentary’s erstwhile filmmaker and eventual subject,Thierry Guetta, actually Banksy, the incognito street art sensation who as recently as last month put Los Angeles into a tizzy by splashing his guerrilla work along Sunset Boulevard? Or is Guetta merely Banksy’s greatest creation, a real life Chance the gardener unleashed upon the world, serving as a paint covered finger in the eye of the very art collectors who made Banksy a millionaire?
These questions, while fun to entertain, tend to overshadow the accomplishments of the film itself, which are beyond debate. An anthology of street art (or vandalism depending on whether it’s your property being defaced) culled from thousands of hours of footage and a decade in the making, Exit Through the Gift Shop is the defining document of a temporary medium. Embedded with the likes of such artists as the omnipresent Shepard Fairly, Ron English, Invader, and Banksy himself, Guetta obsessively videotapes (and serves as the occasional accomplice on) covert missions to ironically tag public buildings and billboards, providing ground-level access to a world of vaguely criminal imps and muckrakers. At the absolute least, the film is a showcase for a marginalized form of outsider art that is frequently washed away or papered over mere hours after its creation.
What really gives Exit Through the Gift Shop its charge though is how consciously it muddies the waters of subjectivity and the age-old, unanswerable, question, “What is art?” Like the boomers who spent millions on Eric Clapton guitars and baseball cards in years past, the film explores the commoditization of pop art, ridiculing bourgeoisie collectors spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on pieces that expressly mock the wealth, class and status of those who purchase them. Nothing if not a gifted self-promoter, Banksy uses Exit Through the Gift Shop to further disseminate his legend -- filming his own testimonials while hooded, in shadow and with a digital distortion on his voice as though he were in hiding from the mob, implicitly acknowledging that his notoriety and bad boy status is more valuable than anything being hung inside of a frame.
All of which makes the direction the film goes in such a glorious, hilarious rebuke. After being dismissed from the project for turning in an avant-garde inspired rough-cut of the film (which Banksy calls “unwatchable” without a hint of irony in his mechanized voice), the roles of documentarian and subject are reversed: Guetta rechristens himself Mr. Brainwash and distorts every cynical lesson his mentor instilled in him, while Banksy and his camera crew can only look on in horror. Creating highly derivative, easily reductive work and exploiting the public’s insatiable demand for hype, Mr. Brainwash (or MBW) becomes a media sensation, instantly wealthy and a towering art world figure for our Lady Gaga-inundated times (not for nothing, the best joke in the entire film is the revelation that MBW had been commissioned to design the cover of a Madonna album).
Sickeningly funny and equally effective as an appreciation of, and bludgeon against, modern art, Exit Through the Gift Shop attempts to use context and intent to differentiate between good art and bad.Inevitably though, the film places Banksy and Fairley, amongst others, into the roles of befuddled critics scratching their heads over how anyone could be hoodwinked by this “junk.” It’s both sour grapes from the cool kids and a long sobering look in the mirror: how much value can there be in a discipline if really anyone can do it? Ultimately the film argues that the worth of art is entirely in the eye (and wallet) of the beholder. How fitting then that Exit Through the Gift Shop is my choice for the best film of last year." - Andrew Dignan
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