Putting a price tag on the taggers
June 15, 2010
At the recent Australian premiere of Exit Through the Gift Shop, the crowd was abuzz with just one question: do you think he'll be there?
"There" was the after-party, held just across the road from Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image in laneway bar Misty. "He" was Banksy, the world's most-famous street artist, and, judging by the evidence of the pseudo-documentaryExit, a bloody good filmmaker too.
Though every ear at the party was tuned to detect the gentle burr of a Bristol accent, Banksy wasn't there (though the late arrival of a man in a bear suit did raise some doubt). But the world's second-most-famous street artist, American Shepard Fairey, was. In a manner of speaking.
Hosier Lane – the graffiti-covered alleyway that's home to Misty and scored a recent guest slot on an episode of MasterChef – had been decked out for the party with lightboxes featuring the work of Fairey. They were (and still are) there courtesy of City Lights, the not-for-profit installation project run by Andy Mac, who also runs the laneway gallery Until Never. He'd created the installation in conjunction with the film's distributor, Madman.
Mac's gallery sits a couple of floors above Misty, down a side lane. On the brick wall that runs from Misty to the gallery door, there's more Fairey — a huge mural of posters that includes, among other things, portraits of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Upstairs, there's yet more Fairey. The Until Never show is fairly small but includes Fairey's most famous piece — the ObamaHope poster — plus a four-part work created for a Levi's campaign and pieces from his signature Obey series (a series that has also spawned a line of clothing).
The work inside the gallery has a price tag. The work on the street does not. Does that mean one lot has value and the other does not? And if so, which one is valuable, and in what way?
Is the work on the street more authentic, more "Shepard Fairey", than that in the gallery, because it was created not for sale or for a commercial client, but for "pure" purposes? Does it matter that the work in the laneway was not put there by Fairey? Is it still "his"? And how much was it ever his anyway when so much of the imagery has been appropriated from pre-existing works? (Fairey is in fact still in a messy legal fight with the press agency AP over his use of the Obama image, in which the AP claims it held copyright.)
This swirl of questions is provoked by Fairey's work, and the complex interplay of the commercial and the subversive it represents. And not coincidentally, it is also provoked by the Banksy film.
Exit Through The Gift Shop is a movie that, we're led to believe, came into being largely by accident. A second-hand clothes merchant, LA-based Frenchman Thierry Guetta, had spent a decade videotaping street artists (it all begins when he discovers he's related to the French artist Space Invader) but had no idea what to do with the crates of tapes he'd accumulated. Enter Banksy, the one street artist he's never filmed, who gives Guetta unprecedented access because his good mate Shepard Fairey says he's legit. But when Guetta makes a hash of his attempt to edit the footage into a film, Banksy takes over, and instead makes a film about Guetta.
As part of the trade-off, Banksy encourages Guetta to stage a show of his own. Guetta enlists a small team of artists to turn his "ideas" into work, the show is a smash, and the former ragtrader — now known by his alias MBW (aka Mr Brainwash) — makes a motza.
Moral of the story? Anyone can do it. The art world is gullible. Don't believe the hype. All art is appropriation. The author is dead. Authenticity schmauthenticity. Or pretty much any other reading you care to come up with.
There's a wonderful conspiracy theory doing the rounds that Mr Brainwash is not Guetta at all, but Banksy (read the comments here and for a counter-argument, see this post here). I prefer to imagine it's Banksy and Fairey in collaboration.
Given the elusiveness of Banksy — he is interviewed in the film (by whom?), face hidden by the strategic shadow cast by his hoody, speaking through a vocal distorter — we may never know what, if any, role he or Fairey or anyone else played in constructing the identity of MBW. And it wouldn't make any difference if we did.
Exit Through the Gift Shop — part absurdist comedy, part polemic — is one of the most open texts ever made. It resists explanation. It has meanings galore, but not a meaning.
Still, this much it says to me: It's about our fetishisation of the ephemera of street art, our desire to take the transitory, transgressive and illegal and "frame" it so that it has monetary and institutional value, so that it can be bought, sold and hung. It's about the commodification of the counterculture.
It's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in a spray can.
And how's this for a moment that sums these issues up in all their contradictory glory? On his way to the opening of a massive retrospective of his work at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston last year, Fairey was arrested by police on outstanding graffiti charges. Feted artist and street hoodlum ... on the very same night (he never did make it to that opening).
Fairey and Banksy have profited handsomely from the massive interest in street art, but I have a theory that they might feel just a little nostalgic for the days when they could simply spray a stencil or hang a poster and slink off into the night, famous within a small circle of like-minded souls but a riddle to the rest of the world. For the days when they were telling gags in a secret language known to only a few. For the days when nobody asked, "how much for the Obama?" or "do you think he'll be there?"
Incidentally, rumour has it that Fairey will visit Melbourne in September to coincide with an exhibition of his work at Metro gallery in Armadale.
There'll be some Banksy pieces in that show too.
Don't be too surprised if Mr Brainwash makes his presence felt on a wall near you around the same time.