Banksy was reportedly hanging around Park City – his presence can’t be confirmed, because no one ever actually sees him – for the premiere of the film “Exit Through the Giftshop,” which U.K. newspaper The Guardian describes as a “documentary about Banksy’s relationship with an impressionable French filmmaker/stalker.” That filmmaker/stalker’s name is Thierry Guetta, also known as “Mr. Brainwash,” the name he comes to adopt midway through the film when, after documenting Banksy executing his signature stencil art, he decides he wants to become a street artist, too. Cue the film’s twist, as Banksy reverses roles, stepping behind the camera himself to document the road to Mr. Brainwash’s exhibit in Los Angeles.
Bipolar plot aside, the documentary was essentially created to showcase the two men’s work in particular and urban art in general. The Guardian reports that “the crowd [at Sundance] loved it… all the film buyers were in attendance, and it would seem only a matter of time before the story of the quixotic Frenchman and his wry British mentor plays out on a far broader canvas than the screen at the Library Centre Theater.” Wry might Banksy have been in the theater that day, but elsewhere in Park City, that didn’t get him too far. Police saw his stencils – including a kneeling angel and Osama Bin Laden – as vandalism. And in Utah, the law’s the law. So while people packed into a theater to watch a legendary street artist at work, on those very same streets, city workers were busy covering that work up.
A recent blog post on Esquire.com titled “Mystery… or Modern Marketing?” suggests – shockingly! – that Banksy stenciled the sides of various buildings and rocks in Park City leading up to the premiere of his film to generate buzz for it. If that’s the case – which it almost certainly is, because why the hell else would he be in Utah? – his stencils were more than just art for art’s sake: they were a form of guerilla advertising, a label that could be argued to encompass a vast majority of graffiti. And in a world in which almost everything can be an advertising platform, including grimy city streets and the floors of bathroom stalls, it’s not surprising to encounter this kind of marketing tactic. But you have to wonder: did he do it so that people could spot his infamous art and get excited for the movie? Or did he do it knowing that it would probably be covered up, therefore creating even more buzz for a movie about an already-controversial form of art?
What’s even more interesting is the suggestion made by blog ANIMAL that the city workers’ method of eradicating Banksy’s graffiti became a form of vandalism in itself. The paint used to cover it up wasn’t quite matched, so rather than seeing Banksy’s stencil of Osama bin Laden drawing back the curtain of a window in a closed door, for example, people in Park City now see a large gray blob.
That large gray blob will be remembered, at least for a little while: not for depicting bin Laden, not for symbolizing the War on Terrorism, but for the subjective nature of the art that lies beneath it, for the subjective nature of the man who drew it, and for the objective nature of how advertising – specifically, self-promotion – so permeates our modern culture that, in a twist of irony, even those who seek to destroy it are often the ones effectively keeping it alive.
