Beguile On Main Street

Exit Through The Gift Shop
Coronation Street Art
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Street art is everywhere above ground, but for most of the past decade, the movement and its illegal defacing perpetrators have largely remained on the fringes of the underground.  That is no longer the case when a dude like Shepard Fairey‘s crafting iconic images for the Obama campaign and Banksy‘s designing album covers for Blur.  Their street art has now become a full-fledged commercial art phenomenon, and with big bucks at playand  pretenders jumping at the chance to cash in

The BRILLIANT new doc Exit Through The Gift Shop (narrated by Rhys Ifans) goes over all of this, under it, above it, behind it and beyond it.  It all starts and ends with a French expat living in America named Thierry Guetta.  He loved filming anything and everything, and after a light-bulb switching on moment when visiting his cousin Invader, he stumbled on his (first) calling: document the street artists in action.  And film he did, mainly after dark, scaling buildings that weren’t meant to be scaled, dodging coopers and amassing a garage full of tapes that he never watched.  Along the way he hooks up with Fairey and some other known artists, but his dream subject, the mysterious and most elusive Banksy, remains juss that, mysterious and elusive

Eventually he finds Banksy, they find kinship in one another, and then the two do something for each other.  Guetta, solid at filming, but lost in filmmaking, hands his tapes over to Banksy and BAM-O, Banksy becomes the director of the very documentary we’re blabbing about.  With nothing to do (cept he has a family who barely sees him), Banksy suggests to Guetta that he try his own hand at becoming a street artist, which only seems natural since he knows the ins and outs.  What Banksy didn’t know is that he created a monster and unleashed him on an very unsuspecting world.  The results are hilarious, shocking, and embarrassing, as the LA art world embraces Guetta, now going by the very fitting name Mr Brainwash, and his tacky/hacky art

Exit Through The Gift Shop has more to say about the state of art in modern times, than we have to say about fried chicken and boobs, and it knows what it’s talking about, juss like we do about chicken breasts and breasts.  Partner this with the one-sided, but totally revealing and enjoyable The Art of The Steal and you’ll have all the inside art school confidentiality you’d ever want to be privy to

Poster Haste Never Makes Waste: our mos flavorite street artist remains NY’s own Poster Boy

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Gift keeps on giving in NY/LA/SF today and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…