Exit Through the Gift Shop is the first and perhaps the last movie to be made by the mysterious English street artist Banksy, and although it’s partly about himself and his fellow night marauders — among them Shepard Fairey, now most famous for that ubiquitous red, blue and cream Obama poster, but also the creator of the Andre the Giant sticker campaign of the late 1980s — there’s nothing self-aggrandizing about it. Or perhaps everything about it is self-aggrandizing. The picture strives to capture the spirit and style of street art, and to make a bold statement about its commodification: Banksy’s work, in particular, is prized by collectors and fetches high prices in the art market. But if Banksy is getting rich, he doesn’t seem to be too happy about it. And so he has framed his film as a rags-to-raggedy riches story in which an enthusiastic street-art fan — a nutball Frenchman transplanted to Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta — first becomes a Banksy disciple and then surpasses his teacher, launching a mega-million-dollar art career of his own.
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In Theaters: Exit Through the Gift Shop
