Who owns the Gift Shop?

(Originally published in The Peak on January 17, 2011)

The rumors around street artist Banksy’s documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop aren’t stopping. First it was a question of the film’s authenticity. Now it has become a question of ownership.

Released as a documentary, the elusive Banksy appears on camera in a mask and voice modifier to tell the story of Thierry Guetta, a street art documentarian turned artist himself. Thierry climbed his way to the top of the street art ladder, beginning with Space Invader in France, then Shepard Fairy in California, eventually making his way to Banksy’s inner circle. He had his camera on the entire time. When it came time for Thierry to produce the documentary he’d been promising, the result was a film called Life Remote Control, which was, for all intents and purposes, 90 minutes of complete nonsense. Banksy took the thousands of hours of Guetta’s footage and decided to make a documentary of his own. Exit Through the Gift Shop is the result.

Banksy insists that the Gift Shop material is authentic.

“If I’d written it myself there would have been a car chase and lasers. Unfortunately there’s neither,” he said in an (anonymous) interview. Critics didn’t care much; they said the intrigue added to the film.

Rumors persist about an impending Oscar nomination. A wanted street artist, the most famous anonymous person in the world, who seems to spend most of his time thinking up ways to poke fun at the establishment, could be nominated for an Oscar. Will the irony never cease?

Now Jaques Levy, the filmmaker who helped Guetta put together Life Remote Control, wants credit for his work, which only adds to the discussion. If Exit is a ruse, then it only becomes more elaborate. If it’s authentic, then it’s just getting more complicated.

If the film truly is about challenging the artistic values that we hold, I find a deeper sense of irony that Banksy, and everyone else involved, still rides the monetary wave of success that his fame has brought him.

“Graffiti isn’t meant to last forever. I’d prefer someone draw a moustache and glasses on one of my pieces than encase it in Perspex,” he says. Of course, that’s easy enough when no one knows who you are, and with Levy looking for his pound of flesh, this philosophy might have to take a back seat to more practical considerations.

The film sits in the public eye like everything else Banksy does: half beautiful, half shocking, and with just a dash of hypocrisy.