Artists and art aficionados, check this movie out! If you don’t know who Banksy is, look him up, then head to San Francisco and watch this film. Banksy plays with notions of what art is, who owns art, and most importantly (for most people, anyway), who gets to make the money off of it.
This movie had me thinking the whole way home about what my own definitions of art were, but then I started thinking — wait, is it all a game? Who makes the rules? Are there even any rules in this game? And am I a player — or am I the one getting played?
Heck, don’t even read this review below. Go watch the movie first.
Trust me.
I saw Banksy’s movie “Exit Through The Gift Shop” last night. If you live in or near any of the cities listed here, go see this movie.
It was a very good movie, I liked it, I laughed a lot and it also had the hamsters in my head running overtime. First it starts off with some loser named Thierry Guetta who’s highly fascinated (or at least it looks that way at first) with street art and goes out of his way to document a lot of it and even befriends a lot of well known street artists like Swoon, Buff Monster, etc. etc. and eventually finds his way to Banksy and befriends him. So he follows all these artists around and documents their work. Banksy eventually tells him one day that instead of documenting everyone elses art to go make his own and leave all the documented tapes with Banksy, which he did, and then Banksy took over the project. That’s when everything changed.
The other part of the movie focuses on Mr. Guetta’s alter ego I guess and starts calling himself, “Mr. Brainwash”. To me this is when things got really interesting, and this is when it really makes you think about not just the art game, but everything in life. Mr. Brainwash pretty much brainwashed himself and got started caring only about himself, he started ripping off a shit load of the artists (street, pop, etc. etc.) and began selling their pieces as his own work. He began making millions off of shit that he never ever had a hand in. It gets deeper, but I’ll leave all the inbetweens for you guys when/if you watch the movie.
Street Artists generally already think outside the box. I’m not sure the way Banksy thinks has anything to do with a box. When he said to collapse the box and take a fucking sharp knife to it, he must have discarded the remains of the box as well. The man is post-conventionalism at its finest.
It makes you ask the old questions, “what is art?” and “why do we do what we do?”
It’ll make you think, wonder, and if you have a mind that doesn’t stop like mine, it’ll make you say, what the fuck?
Years ago before I devoted my extra time into working with cars I used to play with the art game. I got into graphic and web design, I sketched a lot, and I was part of a small-time tagging crew aspiring to be like the many big graff’ writers I’m always seeing. I reminisced about all of that and wondered why I did all of it in the first place.
I wondered if I really loved doing any of it, or if I did it because I thought it would get me somewhere, did I do it because it had a chance of getting me up somewhere in the world? or did I really do it just because I enjoyed all of it? For what purpose do we play the art game in the first place? Many artists come off as lovers of their craft, yet exploit it to make themselves a bunch of money, and then what? It’s something we see all the time. For example, the music game. In rap how many artists have come out sounding raw and real, but once they get the paychecks it’s like they forgot who they are and what they’re doing. Hell, many people in general let the fame and $$$ get to their heads.
Integrity vs Ethics. For love, or for the love of $$$$$$$$$$.And then there’s the debacle of originality vs regurgitation. They say the best artists steal, but to what extent can we really hold that true? When do the original artists get their dues if they ever do? Banksy has mocked this saying before, and now I see why. This also falls into the integrity vs ethics category.
It had me asking a lot of questions, some I probably shouldn’t even have to ask.
Overall though, me and my friends thoroughly enjoyed it & had a lot of laughs. Truly a classic by a real innovative mind, though he claims not to be one. As Banksy describes it, it’s basically the story of how one man set out to film the un—filmable. And failed.
(via streetsofla)
