Exit Through The Gift Shop

This past week we viewed Exit Through the Gift Shop. This documentary directed by the famous masked artist, Banksy captures everyone's attention when it addresses the issue of art. Through the eyes of Thierry Guetta, a French, wannabe film maker, the viewer is given a behind the scenes look of the world of graffiti. Thierry tells several famous graffiti artists including Banksy himself, Space Invader and Shepard Fairey that he is filming them to make a documentary (in which he had no real intention of doing). Turns out, Thierry ends up trying to take a crack at it as he basically conjures up similar looking art in comparison to Banksy’s. Once he realizes what Guetta’s real intentions were, Banksy cleverly put together this documentary, depicting Thierry as, well…a crazy man.

 As I began to watch this film, I thought to myself “oh great, another documentary about art.” However, this wasn’t the case. As the story develops, we see the direction of the documentary take a sharp turn to a more controversial issue: What makes someone an artist? To me, an artist is someone who puts time, energy and emotion into a creation they truly believe in. Artists do not stop working until they get exactly what they imagined. This wasn’t what the amateur French man focused on. Instead, Thierry came up with the idea to hold an art exhibit of his own, where he would showcase hundreds of items of his work. Only there was a small problem, 99% of the work contained no trace of originality or personal effort from him. Guetta focused more on money and popularity, over the true aspects of art and reasons of holding an art show.

When the film concluded, I held a very strong opinion about Thierry Guetta and still do. Although he may consider himself an artist, he should in no way be taken seriously due to his lack of contribution to “his” art and his (excuse me) stupidity. However, besides the ignorance of this person shown, I still believe the film was very well put together and for the most part, enticing.

Rating: On a scale from 1-10: 6.5