These graffiti guerrillas sure are a strange species. They dash back and forth, spray can in hand, from the concrete overpasses of the night to the sparkly shine of Sotheby’s and
celebrities. They call each other sellouts as they cash Publishers Clearing House-size checks.
The superstar of the field is “Banksy,” the otherwise anonymous Brit whose often witty stenciled graffiti made him first famous and then rich. His first film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” is tangentially about himself and similar pavement Picassos — but it’s mainly about a supremely annoying French-born LA clothier who became a hugely successful artist without pausing to consider his utter lack of originality or talent.
The Frenchman, Thierry Guetta, started out filming the moonlit escapades of such graffiti masters as “Invader” and Shepard Fairey, who before creating a famous Barack Obama poster obsessively plastered a stylized image of wrestler Andre the Giant on any inviting outdoor surface.
After meeting, Banksy and Guetta shared a droll escapade at Disneyland, where Banksy planted a life-size mannequin that looked like a Gitmo prisoner and earned his captured accomplice four hours of interrogation in the House of Mouse. As a result, Guetta became a confidant. He won Banksy’s blessing to document his work on film, but the caveat was that Banksy’s face and voice would be obscured at all times.
But Guetta, as Banksy points out in this funny and wonderfully misshapen conversation piece, was not a filmmaker — so Banksy himself took over the project.
Meanwhile, Guetta, borrowing heavily from Banksy, Marcel Duchamp and especially Andy Warhol, went into business as an artist himself. And I do mean business: Restyling himself “Mr. Brainwash,” Guetta organized an LA exhibition in which he flogged nearly $1 million worth of the most appallingly derivative McArt. Silkscreens of Michael Jackson in blond Marilyn hair — and Jack Nicholson. And Leonard Nimoy. You get the idea.
Banksy makes an appealing narrator with a deft grasp of the questions raised. He carps that Guetta (later hired by Madonna to design a feebly Warholish album cover) broke the rules — but “there aren’t supposed to be rules.”
Despite his tepid claims that his work is “not about the money, not about the hype,” Banksy knows he isn’t the man to howl commercialization. He may have been underground once, but selling items at Sotheby’s for more than 100,000 pounds sterling is about as overground as it gets. Moreover, some of Banksy’s most renowned works, such as reworked images of Kate Moss and the Mona Lisa, are also ripoffs of Warhol and Duchamp.
“Gift Shop” “isn’t ‘Gone With the Wind,’ but there’s a moral in there somewhere,” Banksy says, and if at times he sounds a bit cranksy, he seems at least partly justified. When Guetta’s cash register threatens to combust from overuse, it’s as if Robin went off and figured out how to rescue Gotham City all by himself — and then stood around regaling the media with his exploits.