EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

dMYD DVD

Starring Art
Trailer

M

  Wow, it’s a documentary about Thierry Guetta, aka Mr Brainwash, and his first ever gallery show! Oh. No it isn’t. He’s a street artist. Only he’s not. But he is. But he’s not. But he might be. It’s not going to be a Michael Bay film.

  There’s a bit in the first ever episode of The Thick Of It where that hapless MP guy who turned out to be a paedophile looks to the Alistair Campbell caricature and admits that he isn’t sure what level of reality he’s meant to be operating on at the moment; imagery, opinion and mass media have distorted what it means to be human so much in the past twenty years that politics, identity and everything else has been hopelessly chucked into a swirling maelstrom of nonsense, misunderstanding and pure lies, all in a desperate attempt to promote false integrity over reality itself. Nothing makes sense anymore, and nobody knows what anyone else is saying. Culture’s had the disease for years.

  Scott McCloud, the guy who writes books about comics, has a pretty simple definition of art. It’s human expression, something outside the fucking and killing to while away the hours trapped in our brains. The problems begin when that art is chucked out to be gawked at by someone else; then it becomes ‘for’ something, and everything quickly spirals out of control, like that time Jeremy Kyle tried to do his show in America and found himself dangerously out of his depth.

  Banksy is an artist, a man/men who does things in the streets and leaves them there, and some people look at them and some people clear them away and some people buy them for millions of dollars and lock them in their closet with all the bodies of their maids/ex-wives/postmen. And now he’s decided to make a piece of art on a DVD. It’s something called a film. It’s supposed to be a documentary, and it may or may not be a gigantic cauldron of bullshit that follows his unlikely protégé Thierry Guetta, a man so inept and stupid that he has to be real, because the world is full of people like him, people who gawp at his rubbish work and assess it and consider its meaning. But then again, he can’t be real because he’s a living piece of Banksy art, and everything here is a ginormous piss-grab on the insanity of the art world. Isn’t it?

 People like Guetta’s paintings. They get enjoyment out of them, so they’re worth something. Madonna liked them so much that she commissioned Mr Brainwash to produce the cover to her 2009 greatest hits album, which is the funniest joke on an old-bird ever if you’re a hipster wank-bag, or just a pretty album if you’re shopping for music in Tesco. Everything in the great circle of life exists in a subjectivity vacuum, a gigantic cultural Schrodinger’s cat yowling and burping hairballs across the sky: it’s only us stumble-apes that can reach up and slap a meaning on it, and we’re a bunch of dickheads. Playing with these concepts, throwing them around and seeing what sticks looks fun for Banksy and his parade of possibly-imaginary friends, but it doesn’t make for a very entertaining film. Imagine if Guetta was played by Chevy Chase, then we’d be getting somewhere.

  Essentially it doesn’t matter how much of the story’s real, what it means or who it’s laughing at. It’s a vaguely diverting transmutation of Orson Welles’ incrediballs F For Fake project, and if you spend too much time thinking about it you’ll go blind and waste a large portion of your life that can be spent kayaking, or huffing meth and watching Ghostbusters. It might be the cleverest film in the world, but it’s not as fun to watch as it is to wear the packed in cardboard amazo-vision glasses that spiral the lights in your room into a kaleidoscope of flashbulbs. Try wearing them outside! They turn natural light into priceless art!

  See it for yourself, make your own decisions. It’s better than this bundle of shit, but Adam and Joe did it better sixteen years ago, and if it’s all so real then why is Guetta played by Joaquin Phoenix? And why is there a shot of Beck Hansen in Guetta’s shop at the beginning?

What would Beck Hansen be doing in an L.A hipster clothing store in 1999?