The two best lines in the remarkable documentary Exit through the Gift Shop come near the end. Ostensibly about the street artist Bansky, the movie follows Thierry Guetta, an awkward vintage clothing store owner who first transforms into an obsessive videographer of L.A. street artists (including Shepard Fairey), and then becomes the artist Mr Brainwash, overnight becoming as successful as the artists he imitates.
Guetta's footage documents guerrilla artists as they create large and elaborate public artworks under cover of night while they dodge the police (or not). Later, we see these same artists' work become valuable commodities, as it moves from concrete walls on the street to hang on the walls in art galleries.
Much of their work repurposes and juxtaposes pop culture imagery and is thus (like the abstract expressionism in My Kid Could Paint That) highly imitatable. Thus, parts of this movie reinforce the idea that the art itself is less important than the story behind the art and the artist -- but Mr Brainwash's work, which has no history, still manages to sell for absurd prices to an art-buying public eager to catch (or invest in) the latest wave.
This presents a number of difficult questions: Does Guetta make art, or does it just look like art? What's the difference? Is Banksy (whose identity is not revealed) directing Guetta? Is the movie a hoax?
So, the two best lines are... well, I'll leave Banksy's excellent last line a mystery, but I'll repeat what his colleague Steve Lazarides says, since it's been widely quoted:
"I think the joke is on... I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke."
