Exit Through the Gift Shop and Learn ‘How To Sell a Banksy’

By  · Published on February 28th, 2011

It’s just a matter of time before enigmatic artist Banksy becomes so enmeshed into popular culture that his name becomes shorthand for a sexual maneuver where you film your partner on CCTV while wearing a monkey mask and decrying the police state. Seriously, folks. Can we make that happen? Yes, we can.

One day in the future when we all realize that Banksy was thirty to forty different people, we’ll look back on this as a quaint time when we were all starting to re-question art on our own terms. Like some French guy slapping a urinal on a wall and pissing on definitions, it’s another generation’s turn to figure out what art is.

That can be a lot of fun, but so can making a lot of money.

Check out the new trailer for How to Sell a Banksy and try to figure out why anyone would want to spend so much time scraping bits of a paper off a concrete wall:

Hat tip to / for posting this up. At the very least it looks funny. It also might make a spiritual sequel to Exit Through the Gift Shop where the torch has been handed off to the average bloke stupidly trying to make money where there seems to be none.

To satisfy your conspiracy theory-loving side, you can spot Mr. Brainwash at 1:18. What is his role in this new documentary? Why hasn’t he shaved that mustache yet?

While one of those questions has an easy answer (that mustache is made of scrap metal), the other doesn’t. Were filmmakers Christopher Thompson and Alper Cagatay spying on him or is he part of the production?

What do you think?

Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.