A few days ago a Robin Gunningham posted a ten minute documentary about Banksy and his tenuous relationship with the art world called “B Movie.” The short has since been removed from its vimeo page, perhaps to prove some point about how the internet, like street art, is an ephemeral art form, but more likely for less interesting reasons. (Here’s a small portion of it I was able to find.) I’m not sure if B Movie was a section of Exit Through The Gift Shop that was cut for length, but if that’s the case, I think the film is worse off for not including it. The short’s exploration of graffiti’s uneasy relationship with art and art’s uneasy relationship with commerce is exactly what was missing from ETTGS’s first half— a facile (though well documented) summary of the last twenty years of street art.
The second half of the movie (documentary?), the part about Mister Brainwash, I found much more interesting— a hilarious meditation on the commercialization of art, the power of hype, and the increasingly thin line between recontextualization and appropriation, between homage and rip-off.
So much of our appreciation of art is influenced by how it’s sold to us and what the larger narrative is. Looking at my list of 2010 movies, I see some of those narratives play out. Was I sucked into the Inception hype? Did Tangled and Easy A benefit from low expectations? Is it more fun to be a cheerleader of something small like a Catfish than something universally accepted like a Toy Story 3? As an artist myself, I like to believe that marketing doesn’t really matter, that meta-narratives, and targeting demographics, and counter-programming, and isolating niche audiences— that all of it is ancillary to the quality of the product being sold; that the good stuff will rise to the top. But of course this isn’t true.
When I made videos with Olde English, we discovered pretty quickly that videos that related to something with its own fan base — like math, or Lost, or popular music, or veganism — always got a lot more hits than other more self-contained silliness, even if the contextless silliness was really funny. But you know what did even better than videos with built-in audiences? Videos with sexy ladies in them. Anyway, what was I talking about? Believing the hype, or not believing the hype, something about hype? I kind of got distracted watching all those old videos. Some of those really hold up, you should watch them.
OR DID YOU JUST GET EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOPPEDED?
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Every year I keep a running tally and ranking of how much I like every movie I see because apparently I can’t just enjoy anything anymore:
1. Catfish
2. Blue Valentine
3. Inception
4. Winter’s Bone
5. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
6. The Fighter
7. How To Train Your Dragon
8. Rabbit Hole
9. Greenberg
10. Somewhere
11. Easy A
12. Animal Kingdom
13. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
14. Toy Story 3
15. The Kids Are All Right
16. True Grit
17. The Social Network
18. Tangled
19. The King’s Speech
20. Exit Through The Gift Shop
21. Black Swan
22. 127 Hours
23. Mother and Child
24. Shutter Island
25. Please Give
26. The Town
27. Salt
28. Dogtooth
29. Splice
30. The Other Guys
31. Date Night
32. Never Let Me Go
33. Fair Game
34. The Ghost Writer
35. Buried
36. Iron Man 2
37. Piranha 3D
38. Kick-Ass
39. Death at a Funeral
40. Sex and the City 2
41. Get Him To The Greek
42. Hot Tub Time Machine
43. Dear John
44. Tron: Legacy
45. The Switch
46. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
