Exit through the Gift Shop is an elaborate hoax

The Banksy-directed and Academy Award-nominated documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop, begins as a comprehensive history of the street art movement around the world. It ends, however, with the meteoric rise of Mr. Brainwash, the man who had been behind the camera for much of the real-life footage. Brainwash, in a short period of time, was shown pulling together an enormous art exhibition and selling more than $1 million in pieces inspired by Andy Warhol and street artists like Banksy and OBEY, both of whom were interviewed in the film. Thousands of visitors flocked to his gallery and marveled at his derivative installments, much to Banksy’s disappointment and confusion. But was everything really how it appeared?

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Many of you may be familiar with Banksy’s work as prolific anonymous street artist with pieces cropping up the world over. Spray-painting with stencils and pasting up printed posters, he’s created some of the most recognizable and interesting nuggets of outsider art in recent memory. He’s organized numerous exhibitions and sold many of his works for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but with this documentary he turned his attention to film — and to one subject in particular.

At its outset, the film centers around street art but eventually shifts to a biopic about Thierry Guetta, French-American “filmmaker” and the alter-ego of Mr. Brainwash (MBW). The film chronicles his interactions with the world’s most famous street artists and his later attempts to emulate their successes. The man is neurotic, speaks very poor English, and at several points feels like a caricature of himself. What is this guy’s deal?

At no point in the film is Guetta shown making his own pieces. His work is relegated to a team of assistants, visual artists in their own right, who employ Photoshop and copying machines to mass-produce derivative images and stencils. The “art” Mr. Brainwash intends to eventually introduce in a gallery show is, in a word, rather horrible — copies of Warhol and Banksy so glaring that even my dog would recognize them.

And yet each sold for thousands of dollars to a mob of enthusiastic patrons.

Guetta’s handlers throughout the movie are interesting to note. Banksy and Shepard Fairey, the American street artist behind OBEY and most famous for his “HOPE” image of then-candidate Barack Obama, are both both depicted helping Guetta along throughout the film. And, subsequently, most of Guetta’s pieces look near identical to theirs — or, at least, bastardizations of their most famous installments. Given the comedic light through which Guetta is viewed at film’s end, and considering the prankster nature of many of Banksy’s other artistic endeavors — indeed, the illegality of his practice altogether — it’s not unlikely to guess that things with MBW’s exhibition aren’t exactly what they seem.

It is altogether possible that the entire character of Mr. Brainwash, both his real-life incarnation — that is, in art shows and on street corners — and the movie’s backstory of him, is completely fabricated. His art, art he is never himself shown creating, could very likely be Banksy pieces operating under some kind of art world false-flag operation, pieces made with the intention of satirizing the art establishment altogether. The fact that a nobody could generate enough hype about and sell thousands of dollars worth of bad art is too ridiculous not to question. And it may very well be that Banksy, and his accomplice OBEY, have fooled audiences and the Academy alike.

Perhaps it is the case that Mr. Brainwash doesn’t exist, that his “art” represented the degree of brainwashing involved in the art world today. Whoever was behind MBW was able to generate a mythos and a level of hype so as to take advantage of art enthusiasts and, perhaps, remind the rest of us just how often we’re coerced to exit through the proverbial gift shop.