The Gift Shop's Knick Knacks

            This week, I watched the documentary "Exit Through The Gift Shop" directed by Banksy. This film followed the experiences of Thierry Guetta, a amateur filmmaker who stumbled upon the brand new world of street art. Street art, or graffiti as it’s more commonly known, is a form of unsanctioned visual artwork that is created in public locations. For instance, one example of street art from the movie was when Banksy and his team bent a phone booth in half, smashed a pick ax into it, and painted around the pick ax in red to make it look like the phone booth was bleeding.

           The movie opened with different shots of street artists painting walls and escaping police with "The Streets are Ours" by Richard Hawley playing in the background. At the end of the movie, this song plays again alongside photos of major street artists and their current situations. From the beginning to the end of the movie, even after you Exit Through The Gift Shop that was Thierry Guetta's art show, street artists still own the streets and not commercialism.

            The uncomfortable way that the movie ended highlighting Thierry's instant success as a commercial street artist bothered me. As a person who sees artists every day work hard to deliver a certain message to their audience, it bothered me that Thierry, a person who didn't have a background actually making street art, was able to employ workers to give him the same success as Banksy, a world renowned avant-garde street artist. Thierry put no real meaning behind his work whereas every piece of art that Banksy did, like the painting on the Israeli-Palestinian dividing wall and the blowup Guantanamo Bay fugitive at Disneyland and the literal elephant in the room at his first public show, all had some deeper meaning that could be derived from it. However, that was the intent, so “Job well done, movie.”

              That is where the poetry behind the title "Exit Through The Gift Shop" came from. The idea is that the original street artists like Space Invader and Banksy represented something authentic and real, whereas Thierry was a more commercialized copy of all of the street artists that he'd witnessed. In other words, Thierry's cheap replications of other artists’ work is like the cheap replications of authentic works in a museum sold at the gift shop. The commercialization is meant to be disturbing to audiences. It's meant to bother us.

               It is hard to limit this documentary to one specific style because it had elements of a participatory documentary, an observational documentary, and an expository documentary. If one style must be chosen, then participatory would characterize the film best, because both the director, Banksy, and the cinematographer, Thierry, were shown in the footage and were heard interacting with all of the other street artists. One could very well argue the film was intended to persuade watchers to be wary of confusing commercially focused copycats with actual artists. Therefore, it is more expository. It’s hard to tell either way, but one thing is for sure this is a truly intriguing and unforgettable film.