Like every other year The Award season ended with the Oscars, and the films for the new season shyly began to arrive. The first productions hitting our screens are sharing a common characteristic: they belong to the group of those films conceived to earn awards and honours, but their result wasn’t promising enough as to finance the costly promotional campaign needed for that purpose; some others had been shelved for a while, waiting for low season to surface. A few new blockbusters in 3D and the odd documentary surprise were also part of the menu on offer to cinemagoers during March.
Our movie of the month belongs to the last category. ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’, the documentary in theory dedicated to the work of the popular British street artist Banksy, turned into an intelligent criticism to the ways art is sold and promoted in our time. It tells the history of a video recording obsessive character who starts filming several street artists, leading to contact Banksy for the project. The cameraman becomes so impressed that sets himself to become one of them, adopting the nickname ‘Mr. Brainstorm’.
What follows is a detailed account of the preparations for his first macro-exhibition; showing little regard for the works exhibited and much more for matching the media-fuelled, high expectations surrounded him. The exhibition establishes Mr. Brainstorm as an overnight success with even Madonna calling him to design the cover of her latest compilation. By the end of the documentary we are none the wiser about Banksy, who manages to keep the mystery of his jealously preserved identity intact; but we have formed a rather cynical opinion about contemporary art worth arguing for.