Hoax or not? An historical perspective.

I'm going to cast my hat in with those that reckon that this entire, lovely, challenging movie is one big, glorious hoax.

Banksy's modus operandi is to take corporate, commercial communications (advertising hoardings and logo spattered civic spaces) and subvert their messaging to make art and cutting social commentary. It's not a great way to make money, but you sure can build a personal brand with all the credibility that penniless anonymity brings.

Surely then Mr. Brainwash is the antithesis - he has taken the lawless and ascetic art-for-art's-sake ethos of the street-artists and industrialized its manufacture and commercialized its distribution, effectively subverting the art critics and buyers who are throwing down money for their own set of the emperor's new clothes - factory fresh. I don't doubt that Thierry Guetta is real - I'm not sure Mr. Brainwash exists though.

To believe in great artists is to believe their cult of personality. There is after all an historical precedent to all this. Remember that all the masters had their ateliers, and apprentices who would paint the boring parts of their canvases. Damien Hirst doesn't paint dots anymore, but he's still selling the paintings. And Rembrandt himself resorted to the commercial production of signed etchings to pay his mortgage.

I think the helter-skelter takes us one turn further though. Accomplished media-hacker that he is, I have no doubt that Banksy is savvy enough to take the well-trodden path of the reality documentary, hoodwink the media to report it as a true story and use it to shill the second-rate output from his workshop, making it commercially viable under the "Brainwash" brand without diluting Banksy as artist folk-hero, just as Proctor and Gamble sell Herbal Essences to the classes and Head and Shoulders to the masses.

Let us not forget "Exit Through the Gift Shop" is a barbed reference to the way that even the great galleries of the world will round off your time with the grand masters by squeezing you out through the shopping experience, where you can buy Da Vinci paper-weights and Degas jigsaws. The clue is in the title.

In fact I doubt even the cowled figure is Banksy himself (playing up to the Bristol Art College thing with the obvious Bristol accent). My money is on that big, shaven-headed chap from the workshop footage back at the London HQ. Best place to hide a tree is in the forest after all.

So what are we left with - probably the biggest gag Banksy has pulled yet - having now added avant-garde, Oscar-nominated, film-festival favourite to his list of not inconsiderable accomplishments. Well played Banksy, well played.

www.breheny.com