Banksy has a knack for exploiting the feverish interest in his anonymity and has provoked a lot of hype around his recent documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. The world’s most notorious street artist turns the camera on himself in the only way he can, to reveal a backlit figure, gesticulating hands, and a voice carefully distorted, as he explains that this isn’t really a film about him. In fact, it is a film about Thierry “Terry” Guetta. Guetta, a Frenchman living in LA, is obsessed with street art and sets out to follow and video major practitioners like Shepard Fairey, Invader and the ultimate catch, Banksy.


What follows is the Guetta creation of an alias dubbed Mr Brainwash, who takes over Hollywood’s derelict CBS TV studio to create a huge-scale, much-publicised pop-street-art exhibition of massive unoriginality, aping Warhol and dribbling paint Jackson Pollock style onto prints passing them off as collector’s items. Entirely taken in, LA Weekly put him on their cover and the art world declares Brainwash a success. What we are left with is an exposé of the art market and the suckers with too much money who want to be part of the latest trend.

But is the joke on us the viewers? We never really know the extent to which Banksy directed this film as we are given no clue of Guetta’s involvement. Indeed, in Banksy’s world we really know nothing and nobody to be who they say they are. Indeed, Banksy has the potential to remain anonymous forever. Even if someone was to come forward and say I am Banksy or if a person was caught doing a Banksy painting, could we ever really belief them to be the real deal? What Banksy has done is to create a persona that is utterly a media construct based on fragments truth and hearsay, where everything is speculation and lives up to Banksy’s inversion of Warhol’s words that ‘In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes’


Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.


References
Telegraph
Guardian

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