"This place is full of motherf***ing artists!"

There has been a ton of buzz lately about one of my favorite movies of 2010, Exit Through The Gift Shop. It's up for a Best Documentary Oscar, despite some controversy as to whether or not it's a hoax. In case you haven't seen it, I have a pretty nondescript trailer below, and you can also watch it for free on Hulu or Netflix Instant Streaming. I highly recommend it, especially if you are at all interested in art/being an artist/buying art.

Basically, we have the story of the transformation of Thierry Guetta from t-shirt hustler to documentary filmmaker to bona fide artist, all the while paying serious homage to big street art names. I've now watched the movie three times: once with friends, once with my parents, and once with my fiancée. Each time, Thierry's dialogue seems more disjointed and spastic, and I get even more frustrated with the whole creative process.

As someone who has always considered graffiti/street art "legitimate" art, I have an immensely hard time watching Thierry's production process. He basically gets the go-ahead from Banksy to be an artist (something he never seemed inclined to do before - he was fine filming artists and helping them out, but never seemed to have any creative ideas), somehow skips the whole creative process and goes directly to selling works he hasn't even made. He takes credit for work that he had very little hand in and becomes an overnight sensation. Personally, I feel that devalues the creative process - aren't we supposed to work on ideas, craft them, and purposefully create in order to make something? Or can we just change the color of someone else's work, slap our name on it and call it our own?

I would also like to point out that the only creative thing Thierry does in the entire movie is walk around and film stuff from different angles. He has ideas for paintings, but they are almost all rip-offs of Warhol and all the street artists he met over the years. Banksy has a superb line at the end of the film,

"Warhol repeated iconic images until they became meaningless, but there was still something iconic about them. Thierry really makes them meaningless."

As a result, neither Banksy nor Shepard Fairey really encourage people they meet to make art anymore, which I think is kind of sad. I still believe that everyone can make art, because everyone has a different way of looking at the world and therefore can translate the world in a different way. That being said, not everyone has what it takes to be a true artist - to work and create and develop a style, even one that changes. It's easier to just copy.

Imagine

I sat down today and decided I was going to watch a movie that has alternated between piquing my curiosity with its beauty and disgusting me with its title and concept. That's right: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

I'm sure the story changed a bit after Heath Ledger died, because the plot of the movie is absolutely absurd and full of holes. For anyone who doesn't know, the movie concerns itself with one Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), an immortal man who keeps the universe spinning by telling stories, and his daughter Valentina (played strikingly by supermodel Lily Cole) who wants to leave her father's ramshackle sideshow operation for a domestic life out of Martha Stewart Living. Parnassus just wants to protect his little girl, most notably from the devil (Tom Waits), to whom she was promised before her birth. Faustian adventures abound for these two, and for most of the movie a possibly-shady-possibly-valiant Heath Ledger/Johnny Depp/Jude Law/Colin Farrell swaggers around the real and imaginary worlds, either messing things up or working miracles.

The imaginary world really carries this movie. The real world is, well, real: it's full of drunken jerks and crooked politicians and greedy socialites. Surrounded by all that, the double-decker sideshow theatre looks like a Baroque painting of a Greek myth. That's a comfort in itself, but once you go into your imaginary world, things just keep getting better. They were all designed to resemble famous paintings, but all eventually grow rampant in their own creative directions (gondolas, Willy Wonka candy-scapes, celestial lily pads and lotus blossoms, pop-up forests, designer shoes and Fabergé eggs, deserts, ladders to clouds, you name it). It's divine just relaxing and enjoying these dream worlds while they last.

Unfortunately, like every other dream, you have to wake up and try to make sense of the plot of this movie. If you want a great movie about imaginary worlds and their real-life consequences, watch The Fall (then buy it on Blu-Ray, because you will want to watch it again).

Reveling in the sumptuous beauty,

K