Mind Over Media: Exit Through the Gift Shop

I've always wondered how artists earn a place in history, or even 15 minutes of fame.

Maybe it takes long hours perfecting a style or just a stroke of genius, but French immigrant Thierry Guetta, or his moniker Mr. Brainwash, has neither. Yet, he's become an overnight sensation in street art — from never touching a stencil to million dollar galleries.

My friend suggested Banksy's, the famous British street artist, documentary, "Exit Through the Gift Shop," for this week's column.

I thought it would be an insider's look at the fascinating world of street art, focused around one of its stars, Banksy, and the social and political commentary he employs in his work. But the film (and this column) turned to Guetta and the question of street art commercialization.

"Exit" opens with Guetta, a crazy Frenchman, with an obsession with filming anything and everything, and it documents his peculiar rise in the street art world.

He essentially drops his job, family and life to travel the world and film, and in the process convinces street art's biggest names that he is going to produce a documentary about their culture. Banksy eventually finds Guetta in Los Angeles and lets the filmmaker into his secret life.

But Guetta's attempted production was more of an acid trip than a coherent movie, with Guetta attempting to edit a string of film together from the thousands of unmarked tapes he had stored in boxes over the years.

"It was at that point when I realized Thierry wasn't actually a filmmaker, and he was maybe just someone with mental problems, who happened to have a camera," Banksy said in the film. So Banksy, not Guetta, spent the next year organizing 10,000 hours of footage and reversed the story to feature Guetta instead.

Banksy also suggested that Guetta should try making street art himself, but Guetta's art lacked a personal style. He merely took iconic historic or pop-culture icons, altered them slightly and put them forward as original and fresh.

Throughout the documentary my friend would say, "I hate him. I can't believe this. This is not real," and his reaction is not unusual.

A lot of critics are unsure if the film isn't actually a mockumentary, and if it's really Banksy silhouetted in the frames with his voice masked, but what is real (and what my friend wished was not) is Mr. Brainwash, the name that Guetta assumes for his art.

Mr. Brainwash's 15 minutes are still ticking. He's had gallery shows, selling pieces for hundreds of thousands of dollars — such as his Jim Morrison portrait made of broken vinyl records.

What gets me, and also my friend, is that his style is nothing but the crazy ideas that employees compose for him.

Maybe that's art, and we all have it wrong.

michael.beall@umontana.edu