Art On Film

In one of my previous posts I had mentioned wanted to watch more art films. (At least I'm pretty sure I said something about that...) Last night's selection was Exit Through The Gift Shop, a film by Banksy. I honestly didn't know that much about the premise of the movie before I pushed play, but anything relating to street art or Banksy more specifically is enough for me to want to see it. I've been interested in street art since I was in middle or high school. I remember spending a lot of time in my C++ class pouring through http://www.artcrimes.com/ and dreaming of being my own bad ass anonymous renegade with a backpack full of spray cans. I started off trying to emulate "wildstyle" text based images on scraps of paper, carefully drawing brick and mortar behind the images. I envied boys with chisel tipped paint pens who could scrawl out their tags in almost illegible script filled with flourishes and more corners and angles then any letters were ever meant to contain. I never saw how anyone thought that the true artists were doing something wrong or unwanted. I always thought that where the artists chose to display their work was a compliment to the space, they were making it better, more interresting, and most of the time truly beautiful.

Dirty Ol South Crew: Richmond Virginia - I used to draw those robots on everything...

Living in Virginia doesn't really give one all that many opportunities to glimpse great street art "in situ", but there are some really great artists out there in the area who are a little less prolific. Living in Richmond, you can see some really great pieces like the one above by the Dirty Ol South Crew. I think there would be a whole lot more of it around if VCU didn't have signs all over everything stating that graffiti was a crime punishable by expulsion from the art program and criminal charges. We all wanted to make our city more beautiful, but college is expensive... and jail isn't a barrel of monkeys either.

Street art as a movement has grown and expanded all over the world with artists exploring new mediums and taking to new heights, literally sometimes, to show their audience what they are made of. I personally have had a lot of fun seeing what the female artist have brought to the table over the past few years. Miss Van started off scrawling on walls with the best of them and has made the switch over to canvas, making her work more conventionally accessible. I don't think this is selling out really. Other female artists have taken to the streets with different mediums all together, like the yarn bombers of Sweden and the US. Most recently I saw an awesome video of NY artist Olek covering the NY stock exchange bull with a lovely variegated pink crochet coating. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT0HhNvDFRQ

It lasted only one day, but that's the heavy price of working in a public space. The art becomes just as much about the process and the reaction as it is about about work it's self. I think that most of the more talented street artists out there have moved on the the mainstream art world because the landscape of contemporary art has changed enough to accept them, and possibly because the people demanded it.

Exit Through The Gift Shop touches on this shift in the movement. It provides a first hand look at the beginnings of truly great street art through the eyes of the artists who lived and worked during that time. It lifts the veil of a world that operates mainly under the cover of darkness and shows the very ordinary people who do extraordinary things. Now I don't want to confuse you all when talking about this film, it's a film by Banksy... but it's not really about Banksy. It's about a Frenchman named Thierry Guetta. Thierry was that weird kid in high school who was always trying to hang out with you and your cool friends, he never really fit in, but you didn't have the heart to tell him to leave because he brought you all snack food during lunch and owned all the newest video game platforms.

Plainly, Thierry started out as just "Cousin Thierry", cousin of street artist Space Invader. He always had a video camera strapped to his arm for no reason in particular, always filming, never really knowing why. When he stumbled into the world of graffiti almost accidentally, it became his life's obsession. He was unable to stop his endless pursuit of capturing all that the art world had to offer on film. The thing was, Thierry wasn't a film maker. He was just a guy with a camera. After Thierry fails to produce an actual film at the end of his years of taping everything around him, Banksy takes the tapes, sends Thierry back to the US with the supposed directive to "do some art, have a show or whatever you want." He takes this very, very seriously. His pseudonym "Mr. Brainwash" debuts in grand fashion, producing hundreds of works of art and selling more than a million dollars worth of it at a highly publicized show entitled Life is Beautiful. Here's the big thing though, Mr. Brainwash's art... is bad. Like freshman art school kind of bad. What does this say about the correlation between hype and value in the art world? What does it say about art?

The question has been raised, was all of this an elaborate hoax conceived by Banksy and Shepard Fairey?

I don't think I really care if it was all fake. Really, it doesn't change very much about the movie. The film still manages to cover really great ground in describing the changing landscape of art and showing you where street art and great contemporary art merge. Seeing a young Shepard Fairey in a kinkos printing all of his famous Obey posters was priceless. It gives you a window into the humble beginnings that all artist rise from. Really, that's what Mr. Brainwash does, even if he is a made up entity. He challenges the concept that you have to work hard for what you get. He is a product either way, something that was designed for mass consumption. He made sure that his work would be appreciated in some way by making it just like all of the other iconic artworks. Its like sticking Warhol, Banksy, Fairey, and many other great masters of their craft in a blender and expecting the resulting soup to taste good. Thierry's work leaves a foul taste in my mouth, but I'm thankful for the experience all the same. It shines a light on all that is wrong and right with the art community.