Hey look: An update!

No, we're not dead. This semester has been kicking everyone's ass lately which is why you haven't seen an update here recently. However, we have some really cool stuff in the works, both for this blog and events in meatspace. So stay tuned.

And now for something completely different:

If you haven't seen this film or don't know who Banksy is, you're really missing out and you should use the power of the internet to educate yourself. Oh, wait. You're already doing that.

Who is Banksy? Well, Banksy is this guy:

He's that graffiti street/performance artist who held an art show featuring a live elephant; hung his own artwork in a number of art museums; tagged the wall in the West Bank, you know, that wall, among other things. We're big fans of Banksy here at URF, considdering his skill at subverting and disrupting normal reality. He does some cool shit. He even made a movie.

(SPOILER ALERT! WATCH THE DAMN MOVIE ALREADY!)

But the movie isn't about Banksy. It's about this guy, Thierry Guetta:

Take note, hipsters. Oh, wait, let me give you a better shot of his "ironic" facial hair configuration:
Yeah. That's right. Mutton chops. Mutton. Chops. (!) The word on the street is that these will soon be required for acceptance into Top-Notch Liberal Art Schools (tm), such as Bard College. At the very least, you'll all be looking like this in a few years, so get used to it. But what does this guy actually do? Well, when the film opens, he's "employed" ripping people off so they can think they look cool selling vintage clothing in L.A. What else? As if we're not convinced enough by the mutton chops to believe this guy is a little bit unhinged and full of himself, we're told that he has this odd habit of filming everything. Everything. So, when he just happens to be blasted into the street art scene by way of Invader and Sheppard Fairey ("What, no hyperlink?" you ask? Fine. Fine. Here's your hyperlink.), we, as well as the street artists our oh-so-hip protagonist meets, don't really question him filming everything. Even the ultra-reclusive Banksy, apparently persuaded by the mysterious power of mutton chops, allows himself to be filmed. But it's all ok because, as Thierry tells everyone, he's a filmmaker; he's making a documentary about street art.

Except of course, he's not. He has boxes upon boxes upon boxes of tapes, most of them unlabelled, all of them unwatched. It takes a nudge from Banksy for him to actually put some footage together into this epic street art documentary that Thierry had been talking about for so long. So Thierry makes a film called "Life Remote Control" and shows it to Banksy. And it's total shit. Un-watch-able. The kind of thing that makes moderation projects rejected by the film department at Bard College look like they could have a shot of winning "Best Picture" at the Oscars. Hipsters interested in being "filmmakers": This is how low they've set the bar for you. So Banksy, seeing a few snippets of actually good footage in the mess, takes the film from Thierry, explains that it'll clean up in editing, and tells him to go back to LA, maybe do some art (Thierry has been dabbling in street art while filming Banksy, et al.).

So is Thierry Guetta a filmmaker? As Banksy puts it: "Maybe Thierry wasn't actually a filmmaker; he was maybe just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera."

Banksy decides to take the project, which is how we've come to be watching the film in the first place. Thierry, meanwhile, has fashioned himself a street artist alter-ego by the name of Mr. Brainwash, complete with production team to roll out his "art" on a commercial scale. On the subject of that "art", it's part Warhol, part Banksy, and part Sheppard Fairey, and wholly unoriginal. But, as his first show "Life is Beautiful" demonstrates, although he does virtually none of the actual creative work, and though his style is completely stolen from other artists, Thierry Guetta can sell a painting. Indeed, his work is highly commercially successful, much to the confusion and amusement of Banksy, Fairey, et al.

That's the story we're given. But consider this: Mr. Brainwash, and perhaps the entire character of Thierry Guetta as well, is a creation of Banksy's, in a move to pull an elaborate self-referential prank on the art world by creating an artist out of nothing, but who produces work that the art world cannot help but love, even though/especially because it has no meaning except the commercialisation of art. This would not be the first time that Banksy has made a statement like this, since after his work began fetching high prices at auctions, he put on the front page of his website an image of a crowd bidding on a painting that said "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit." Of course, this reading of the film only adds to its meta-weirdness.

Go see it. Go make art.