![]() Ironically though, the film just heats the hype-induced hot air. They apologize for creating the monster and promise to no longer contribute to the hype machine. Brainwash’s show, which sells over a million dollars in one week. Banksy and Fairey are astonished by the scale of the show, by its blatantly awful art, and by the LA cool crowd’s total inability to see past the hype (well, maybe that’s not so shocking). Their endorsements, and a little help from some Banksy PR people, get half of Los Angeles to flock to Mr. (There is a scene where we see all of these tapes this is when we fully realize that Guetta is probably mentally ill.) Encouraged by Banksy, Guetta starts making his own street art and when he decides to put on “Life is Beautiful” he has the support of both Fairey and Banksy. In fact, he is filming everything - hundreds, if not thousands of tapes full - for no reason at all. Banksy adopts Guetta as a trusted accomplice, thinking that Guetta is making a film about street art. After relentlessly filming Fairey for a while, Guetta meets Banksy and begins filming him all the time. Guetta started out as an obsessive videographer who was introduced to Shepard Fairey by his cousin, the famous street artist Invader. He is the lovechild of Banksy and Shepard Fairey. Brainwash got there with lots of help from street art’s biggest names. He only seems to know that he is cashing in and getting lots of attention. ![]() He seems to have no idea what he is doing or why he is doing it. Brainwash has a massively successful solo show entitled, romantically, “Life is Beautiful.” The show is a gaudy mess of absurdity, a kind of art world Disneyland selling junk to naive people with money who want to be cool. Brainwash” because art, according to Guetta, is all about brainwashing (an idea advanced, in slightly different form, by Plato over 2,000 years ago and thoroughly debunked by Aristotle shortly thereafter). Whenever Guetta talks about his art we are dumbfounded by his banality, his lack of insight or vision, his plain idiocy. Brainwash is the Thomas Kinkade of Pop Art. It is resolutely unoriginal, thoughtless, empty, and cliché. The film relentlessly mocks Guetta, who is portrayed (perhaps veraciously) as the most pathetic, untalented, dumb, borderline psychotic fool in the entire street art world. Brainwash,” into the heights of art world success, but it is not a mere documentary. ![]() The film documents the rise of Thierry Guetta, or “Mr. And the next year when those same hoards are sniffing a different pollen no one really cares about last year’s harvest. How could he? The bees of hype carried him along making him do more and more of that one barely good thing he did to get the buzz going. People look around and realize that the art really isn’t very good after all, that what he was doing on the street was interesting, sort of, but that the artist really has little talent. After the climax of the show the hype can go nowhere but down. The artist thinks he’s getting something out of it: he delights in false praise, deluded by the hype. The hype suffices to sell the majority of works: 15 minutes of fame for the artist and $15,000 dollars for the gallery. A little while later he has his first solo show at some obscure gallery. The artist flies through the Internet - he gets a ton of Flickr views, shows up on Wooster Collective, and floods Facebook newsfeeds. They get inexplicably ramped up about artists who have produced one provocative wheatpaste or had a single clever idea. They exuberantly consume the latest street artworks like hungry piranhas, hyping the artist and his products until there’s nothing left but an embarrassing skeleton. Street art enthusiasts seem to have a thing for destructive fanaticism, but I’m not sure they realize how destructive it can be.
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