‘Exit’ is a brilliant entrance into the art world & a weird mind

"Exit Though the Gift Shop" is a funny romp through the art world, and while I don't know if it's a bona fide documentary, I know what I like.

The movie is the purported record of a friendship between notorious U.K. street-art renegade Banksy and a goofball camera bug named Thierry Guetta. They met as Guetta assembled a video archive of the street-art movement in Europe and the United States.

Or so says Banksy, who does not inspire confidence as a reliable narrator. He lives an anonymous life and appears on camera in shadow, underneath a hoodie. Apparently, he believes that he may be wanted somewhere - by the London bobbies for bending a telephone booth into a pretzel, by Disney security for staging a Guantanamo Bay art installation at Magic Mountain or by animal-rights people for painting an elephant red.

His art is a wing of the Punk movement, and it's with that in mind that we wonder if we're being punked; after Michael Moore and Borat, our bond of trust with the documentarian has never been flimsier.

And Guetta, with his thick French accent and mutton chop sideburns, looks like somebody's idea of a joke. In fact, he looks a lot like Rob Schneider, perhaps workshopping some new character for an Adam Sandler movie.

And yet, as the nonsense unspools, we realize that we're actually learning something - about guerrilla art and the artists, like Shepard Fairey, the guy who created the Obama/Hope image. We learn their craft, their motives, their work habits, even what their critics have to say.

Banksy likes a joke at his own expense, and the movie lingers on a shot of a fellow artist slamming his work as "Brand-alism" - and it's true that Banksy was able to leverage his outsider artist cache into a hugely profitable L.A. show, documented here.

And "Gift Shop" is just getting started. Guetta reveals that he's making a documentary in the same sense that Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" was writing a novel. He's quite possibly around the bend.

Banksy ends up finishing the movie himself, with a nominal new subject, the nutty Guetta. Banksy's real subject, though, is the art world itself. Guetta goes on to craft his own street-art persona (called Mr. Brainwash) and mounts his own L.A. show, one whose "art" is a hack's cheerful mimicry. The show is a smash anyway, and the chumps are flushed - Madonna purchases a "piece" for album art.

Two possilibilities loom - that Mr. Brainwash is Guetta's idea, and the art world is fawning over a guy with no talent. Or Mr. Brainwash and Guetta were Banksy's project from the get-go, his grandest art prank ever, an old punk's guilty revenge on the art world for welcoming him, thereby making him obsolete.

"I never worry about the art world accepting me as a real artist," Banksy says. "I worry about vandals accepting me as a real vandal."

If it's a con, it's brilliant, and if it isn't, it's merely fascinating. Either way, this "documentary" record of the process is amusing, provocative, and enormous fun.