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Sometimes People Tell the Truth
Feb. 1st, 2011 05:48 pmIt depresses me how many people are smug and sure that Exit Through the Gift Shop is fake, and how much of their reasoning for thinking so is "duh - it's obvious, stupid." It isn't to me, a trained filmmaker and Banksy fan with a pretty thorough grounding in street art who spends a significant amount of time going to contemporary art shows. Nothing in the doc seems implausible to me. External research on it checks out - the many, many street artists in the film are real and vouch for the events, the art show in the end was real, the artist at the end continues to sell pieces and be involved in lawsuits over them, his clothing store is real, his family is real, and that process of creating art is real. The editors are real and really spent that much time logging all that real footage, and it was as tedious as you might think. It's all real.
But people are desperate to believe it's fake, without any evidence to suggest it is. Nobody can even tell me why it would be "like Bansky" for it to be a hoax. Banksy doesn't do hoaxes. Bansky's work overall is notably hopeful. Stunts aren't pranks. And as people point out in arguing that it's fake, "it wouldn't even destroy the thesis of the film." Which is why the film would go ahead and say it.
I'm sure part of it is context, a festival season which did include hoax documentaries. But I think more of it is an undeserved feeling of superiority, of being in on the joke and not one of those dupes who would buy bad art.
(And it is bad art. Part of what was horrifying about the film is that it's terrible art, notably different from recontexualizaions that work. The film itself assumes you can tell this, and maybe that's the problem; the film assumes that you, like Banksy, have thought a lot about what is and isn't art, and what kind of appropriation is warranted, and what it says. People are fooled by this stuff; people with money and people who fund museums understand famous and big better than they understand good. This is of course the point of the film, which is very, very sad, and not an indictment of the people who fall for this "prank" but an observation that touches on, for instance, the later work of Damien Hirst, who did start out with something to say but then stopped. It wasn't "look at this fake artist." It was look at this "art" which is so evidently commercialism without art behind it, in a way that is disturbing even to a person who says "everything is art! Go create art!" Like an artist. Like me. Like Banksy.)
I'm not even sure why this makes me so depressed, but it does. Maybe because I feel rightly or wrongly that Banksy is a friend I've never met, a person on my side, and he's being called a liar when it seems to me he's told the truth in the clearest way he could, and has done so throughout his career. Maybe because I myself am often called a liar when I work the hardest to tell the truth (because it "feels" outside the other person's experience), and am believed when I lie to make it more palatable. Maybe because to say it's a hoax lets you off the hook, lets you know you'd never be duped, so you can laugh at those idiots rather than having to worry that:
- The people you teach and help will create things that harm the very concepts you were trying to teach them and thought they understood implicitly
- The people who like your work may only like it because it's famous or expensive, and may be truly unable to tell the difference between the real thing you worked on and thought about, and a knock off that requred no thought
- The time you have spent trying to understand and develop an appreciation for well-regarded art that's outside your comfort zone, and thus expand your own understanding of art and life, may be wasted, because some of it may genuinely not have meaning or value, even though it is celebrated
- There is a fundamental disconnect between you and everyone else, so that you can see good art and bad art (good ideas and lack of ideas) and they just see how slickly something was produced
It's not a prank. It's not harmless to think it is. It's a betrayal of empathy. I feel worse about all the people who smugly insist the documentary is a hoax than I do about all the people who don't recognize bad art in the documentary, which is bad enough. It makes me feel my whole life is worthless. And it makes me feel terrible for Banksy.
ETA: I think another aspect that is getting to me is that the hoax-insisters-absent-evidence sound very similar to the people who insist the 2005 London Subway Bombing didn't happen. (To a lesser extent, they also remind me of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 deniers, birthers, and creationists.) Only this is coming from journalists at the AV Club, Vanity Fair, and The Village Voice.
And nobody thinks that's a problem, because culture doesn't matter, so it's just "fun."
Ciro is heroically trying to divert my thoughts with Beatles Rock Band.
But people are desperate to believe it's fake, without any evidence to suggest it is. Nobody can even tell me why it would be "like Bansky" for it to be a hoax. Banksy doesn't do hoaxes. Bansky's work overall is notably hopeful. Stunts aren't pranks. And as people point out in arguing that it's fake, "it wouldn't even destroy the thesis of the film." Which is why the film would go ahead and say it.
I'm sure part of it is context, a festival season which did include hoax documentaries. But I think more of it is an undeserved feeling of superiority, of being in on the joke and not one of those dupes who would buy bad art.
(And it is bad art. Part of what was horrifying about the film is that it's terrible art, notably different from recontexualizaions that work. The film itself assumes you can tell this, and maybe that's the problem; the film assumes that you, like Banksy, have thought a lot about what is and isn't art, and what kind of appropriation is warranted, and what it says. People are fooled by this stuff; people with money and people who fund museums understand famous and big better than they understand good. This is of course the point of the film, which is very, very sad, and not an indictment of the people who fall for this "prank" but an observation that touches on, for instance, the later work of Damien Hirst, who did start out with something to say but then stopped. It wasn't "look at this fake artist." It was look at this "art" which is so evidently commercialism without art behind it, in a way that is disturbing even to a person who says "everything is art! Go create art!" Like an artist. Like me. Like Banksy.)
I'm not even sure why this makes me so depressed, but it does. Maybe because I feel rightly or wrongly that Banksy is a friend I've never met, a person on my side, and he's being called a liar when it seems to me he's told the truth in the clearest way he could, and has done so throughout his career. Maybe because I myself am often called a liar when I work the hardest to tell the truth (because it "feels" outside the other person's experience), and am believed when I lie to make it more palatable. Maybe because to say it's a hoax lets you off the hook, lets you know you'd never be duped, so you can laugh at those idiots rather than having to worry that:
- The people you teach and help will create things that harm the very concepts you were trying to teach them and thought they understood implicitly
- The people who like your work may only like it because it's famous or expensive, and may be truly unable to tell the difference between the real thing you worked on and thought about, and a knock off that requred no thought
- The time you have spent trying to understand and develop an appreciation for well-regarded art that's outside your comfort zone, and thus expand your own understanding of art and life, may be wasted, because some of it may genuinely not have meaning or value, even though it is celebrated
- There is a fundamental disconnect between you and everyone else, so that you can see good art and bad art (good ideas and lack of ideas) and they just see how slickly something was produced
It's not a prank. It's not harmless to think it is. It's a betrayal of empathy. I feel worse about all the people who smugly insist the documentary is a hoax than I do about all the people who don't recognize bad art in the documentary, which is bad enough. It makes me feel my whole life is worthless. And it makes me feel terrible for Banksy.
ETA: I think another aspect that is getting to me is that the hoax-insisters-absent-evidence sound very similar to the people who insist the 2005 London Subway Bombing didn't happen. (To a lesser extent, they also remind me of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 deniers, birthers, and creationists.) Only this is coming from journalists at the AV Club, Vanity Fair, and The Village Voice.
And nobody thinks that's a problem, because culture doesn't matter, so it's just "fun."
Ciro is heroically trying to divert my thoughts with Beatles Rock Band.
