Word: street
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...film, although an important artifact of this transient genre, is also a critique of street art. “Exit Through the Gift Shop” takes a tragic plunge when, after eight years of gathering footage, Guetta abdicates the camera and begins to create his own street art. Re-naming himself Mr. Brainwash (MBW), Guetta begins to organize his own exhibition of street art, “Life is Beautiful,” despite his relative anonymity...
...unoriginal. They resemble and imitate all of the work he has spent hours filming and abetting. Or, as Banksy himself states in the film, Guetta “repeated things until they became meaningless,” but through a careful marketing strategy he was able to package the street-art aesthetic, and to sell it. Essentially, Guetta cheated street art; he seized the art form, in the midst of its popularity, and turned it into a product of mass consumption...
...Gift Shop” is, much like its maker, both exhilarating and infuriating. It is brilliant, eccentric, and wild. The viewer gets precious glimpses into the creative process of Banksy himself as he hurriedly fixes, by flashlight, one of his infamous mouse stencils on a grimy Los Angeles street. But it is also highly provocative, as Banksy seizes this opportunity to critique our own defacement of this urban art form...
...documentary tells the real truth of Mr. Brainwash’s success: a success due not to creativity, but to careful marketing. The charisma of street art is its ideology, its opposition to the establishment of gallery art. It is art we all can appreciate and we all can contribute...
However the documentary seeks to relay an important message: with the persistent desire to consume street art, to purchase pieces and support exhibitions, we are vandalising the walls upon which the form rests...