Exit Through the Gift Shop, by Nicholas Visalli

The movie that I am going to discuss in relation to its depiction of art history is “Exit through the Gift Shop”. The film tells the story of a French street artist named Thierry Guetta who lives in Los Angeles and spends his time videotaping other popular street artists. This eventually inspires him to become one himself. The movie does a great job of showing how art was a huge influence to many different people and how street art was becoming popular in modern times. Also, the movie does a stellar job at showing the how art was a big part of Guetta’s life and what inspired him to make his mid-life career change.

In the movie, Guetta is just an owner of a small clothing shop in Los Angeles but the shop does not fulfill his passion which is filming. On a trip to France Guetta finds out his cousin is a well-known street artist and Guetta wants to accompany him around so he can film the artists and make a documentary. While they are traveling the movie does a great job at showing all the different artworks that the artist created and this begins to lay the foundation for the film because this gives the audience a sense of how much art really means to not only Guetta but also so many other individuals out there. One of the artworks that is shown in the movie is when Banksy cuts an English phone booth in half and puts it back together in a way that it looks broken and destroyed in order to show the urbanization of modernized England. The movie does a great job at showing off the different styles that street art can take. For example from the film is Guetta’s cousin, known as Invader, is famous for recreating the different characters of space invader and hanging up his artworks all over France while his friend Shepard Fairey was known for creating some political art works in the United States. From this example it just shows all the different forms art can come in as one artist is just creating characters from an old game while another is creating political artworks. The film then continues to show all the different artists that Guetta meets, in particular an artist named Banksy who is a prominent artist in the street art community. They eventually become friends, and Banksy allows Guetta to document his work because he says that street art does not last long so documenting it would help it become popular. In the end Banksy is the one who decides to film Guetta because Guetta does an awful job at putting the film together so he takes it upon himself to create the film. Guetta later becomes a street artist at the urgency of Banksy who films Guetta’s first exhibition which winds up being a huge success.

At this point in the movie Banksy is an established street artist who had a showing in Los Angeles which was a huge success. This led Banksy to convince Guetta to create his own art show. Guetta looked up to Banksy so he took his advice creating his own art show. In order to have a successful showing Guetta needed to find a way to market his viewing sp he decided to sell his house in order to help fund the advertising of his show. Guetta decided to rent billboards all over LA in order to market to the public about his exhibition. Guetta eventually gets caught up in all of the marketing which causes his show to be unfinished when he opens it to the public. Even though the show is not well prepared it ends up being a raging success in which Guetta is able to make millions of dollars by selling multiple paintings which are now in museums all over the world. From Guetta’s exhibition you can tell how much street art has become popular and polarizing in the modern age. At first in the film the audience is given the impression that street art is just graffiti but throughout the film they show that graffiti is a type of art even if it is just spray paint on a wall. Art is a way of someone expressing their emotions, or imagination, by creating a visual artwork and this movie does a great job of showing how art can be anything ranging from drawing space invader characters, to graffiti, to hanging up self-photocopies, painting an elephant art can take many different forms.