DAVIDGOUGHART

Friday, December 17, 2010

Banksy rolling

I finally got around to seeing 'Exit through the gift shop.' I've always felt like Banksy's work was a little too polished, a little too contrived as if it had been designed by some committee in a Canary Wharf agency boardroom.
Anyway, The film is supposedly a clever, clever, mockumentary that turns the tables, in that as opposed to being about Banksy, it is instead a biopic about the French filmmaker who follows our eponymous hero from guerrilla graffitist, to contemporary cult.

Except the documentary maker is nothing more than a hobbyist, and though I shalln't reveal the gag, (oh how I laughed) at the eleventh hour, the whole thing tries to cack-handedly make some high brow statement about the nature of contemporary art.

That Modern art is a con and any charlatan can make it-really? What a revelation.I had no idea.

It's a sort of Spinal Tap for artists if you like.

I didn't.
I mean, even as parody, is there anything more depressing than seeing a rich collector ebulliently talk about adding a Banksy to their Picasso's and Klee's? Some would argue the point-that the joke is on the collector, that it's holding up some sort of distorted mirror, but I believe in fact that the joke is on the artist, because ultimately what you get
isn't smart, just the equivalent of a dumbed-down Twitter sound byte, about the sorry state of it all.

I rather hope the ghastly street scene returns to where it belongs, defacing the gutters as opposed to any legacy future artists can hope to aspire to.

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