What Banksy and I have in common, and a brief film review

I didn’t know that I had something in common with the street artist and cultural icon known as Banksy until tonight. Banksy and I both love rats. It really makes me happy to know someone else loves rats. He even made this rat holding a camera – when I found this as I searched the internet for images of Banksy’s rats, I knew Banksy meant this one for me:

Banksy's gift to me: Rat with camera

Below is a much better photo from flickr of another of Banksy’s works.

Photograph of Banksy's artwork (c) Maya Newman, via Flickr

You should google Banksy, and spend a few minutes (or longer) looking at his work. I (as I so often am) am about ten years behind the curve in bringing him up, but I do anyway because I just saw a very enjoyable film called Exit Through the Gift Shop.

You might have heard this is a documentary about Banksy. It’s not. It’s a documentary about a man who tried to make a documentary about street art. He loved to film, and when he caught up with a cousin in Paris who installed whimsical mosaics of the Atari Space Invader characters on city streets, he became obsessed with filming street artists at work. In following his passion, he became the only person ever to document the artists at work, and amassed a huge collection of videotape of street art that often disappeared soon after it was created- since it was, after all, graffiti and therefore vandalism.

He gained access to many amazing artists, including, ultimately, Banksy (who maintained such anonymity that some suspected he didn’t exist) with his engaging passion for filming them, and with the promise of a documentary – and in the end he proved wholly uncapable of producing it. Which is our fortune, for if he had, the project never would have fallen into Banksy’s hands and taken on the weird twists that it did, with the humor of creative people playing with reality.

When I got home, and began this post, I came across this review in the New York Times suggesting the entire documentary was a farce, another of Banksy’s “works” meant to fool our senses while opening our minds. Maybe it is – not knowing makes it all the more fun. Art or artifice? Does it matter?

Finally, for you,  my own art: stolen photographs of a filmmakers images of street artists’ vandalism. I hope Banksy would approve.