BEFORE: OK, I've made a decision, based on the fact that I re-added up my numbers for the rest of 2015, and it turns out I've got one film too many in the line-up. And checking out the links between films, it seems like most of the time-travel films don't connect to anything else, or even to each other. So, because a few of those films seem to focus on romance, I'm going to move them, and two very romance-oriented films connected to them, to next February. I therefore need to plug that new 6-film hole with 5 more films, so I'm going to add two documentaries this week, and then 3 more films to the pre-Halloween chain. That gives me an 85-film plan that will take me to the end of the year, and the 2016 chain is completely up in the air. If I want to make both chains any better at this point, I'd need to scrap all the links and rebuild them from scratch, a time-consuming, maddening process - one that could be completely obsolete a month from now, so why bother?
For the third night in a row, I'm focused on the intersection between art and truth - I know, I know, if I'm going to learn about Banksy and graffiti art, I really need to watch the 2010 documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop", but I don't have a copy of that. I'll check the TV listings, but I don't think anyone is running it. Maybe I'll follow up with that one later.
THE PLOT: Documentary chronicling the famed street artist's "31 works of art in 31 days" in New York city.
AFTER: I went into this one knowing almost nothing about Banksy, other than the fact that he's a graffiti artist. I must have been busy in October 2013, because I didn't even know that he came to New York City, where I live. Considering New York Comic-Con takes place in October, that must be the reason, because it seems like he got his share of press. He did a different piece of "street art" every day for a month - this is a process I can get behind. The locations were teased on his web-site and twitter feeds, turning the whole thing into some kind of artistic hipster scavenger hunt. It's a game, I get it - but who has time to run around the city looking for art? Doesn't anybody have a job any more?
It seems like the artist didn't take himself too seriously, because there was an audio track released for each piece from this "Better Out Than In" series, something akin to a museum's guided audio tour, which was often self-deprecating and read by a narrator who didn't even seem to know how to pronounce the artist's name. (This seems to be a constant problem, as the artist's fans and even the news anchors depicted in this film often say "Bansky" or "Banksky")
Sometimes the art was just a made-up quote, or the name of something with "The Musical" added after it, in a poke at Broadway. Sometimes it was stencil art spray-painted on the side of a building (a process called "cheating" in the artist's audio-track. Once in a while, it was 3-D art like a Sphinx made out of bricks, or a moving installation like a truck full of cute animal puppets that would get parked outside of meat markets. OK, subversive art, I like where he's going with that.
No one can seem to agree on what a piece of Banksy art is worth, and perhaps that's part of the joke. When art is also graffiti, nearly everything is subjective - at what point does vandalism become art? If anyone besides Banksy spray-painted that, it would be worthless, so how much of a painting's value is based on the name of the artist alone? And if his art is worth so much, why is he leaving it lying around, instead of selling it in a gallery? One day he even hired a man to sell his spray-painted canvases from a stand on the street, and some people just bought them on a whim, not realizing they'd purchased something for $60 that could easily fetch thousands at an auction.
Next question - who does street art "belong" to? The artist, the viewer, or the person who owns the building? There were some cases where landlords painted over the graffiti within a couple hours (really, you can't knock a building owner for being responsible - if you don't paint over a tag right away, you'll have a whole wall full of graffiti by the end of the day) and some cases where the art was protected, even defended from the public. But by using the social media and by setting up this wild month-long chase around the city, clearly Banksy realizes that his art would be nothing without people to look at it.
What Banksy (and his people, whoever they are) created here was essentially street theater - everyone became part of it. If you painted over the art, you became part of the show. If you traveled around NYC to see it, you became part of the show. Heck, if you loaded the art in a truck and brought it to a gallery, you became part of the show. I can't imagine more of a connection between an artist and his fans - even that guy who built all those fabric gates in Central Park years ago wishes he had this kind of connection with people. And yet Banksy remains safely, defiantly anonymous.
Occasionally the messages seemed a bit strong - by including footage of Jihadists in his web-messages, or using classified footage from a Baghdad airstrike, he risked turning off more Americans than he turned on. And even the best use of Banksy art during this month - buying a piece of landscape art from the Housing Works thrift store, adding Banksy art to it, and then re-donating it to the store - seemed a little off-message when the added art turned out to be a Nazi officer, sitting on a bench, gazing into the sunset. The store was able to auction the art for thousands of dollars, raising money for the homeless, but I imagined Banksy somewhere, obnoxiously yelling like Bill Murray at the end of "Scrooged" - "You're hungry? Here, have a SANDWICH! I GET it now!"
Whether you regard Banksy as a modern-day Picasso or as just another vandal, I've seen his ilk before - someone who wants to be famous but also remain anonymous. Remember the Residents? They're a band that has been around since the late 1960's, but they've always performed wearing giant eyeballs over their heads, or similar masks. In the late 1980's I worked as a P.A. on a documentary about them, that was where I met Penn & Teller face to face. Naturally, on a film set you get to know everybody, and there were a couple of guys floating around who I didn't recognize. Since I drove the production van, the director asked me to give one of them a ride home, and what I didn't know at the time was that he was probably one of the Residents himself. The director (more or less) confirmed this the next day - and for years it's just been one of those "I know something you don't know..." things that keeps me going. Once you see behind the curtain, you're in on the joke and you also want to close the curtain behind you so the next guy can't come in. So I understand the cult that's surrounding this Banksy guy, helping to protect his identity.
The Residents have managed to put out dozens of albums, perform live hundreds of times, and yet nobody knows their real names for sure. If anyone is asked the question flat out, that person will then deny he's in the band. Together with Banksy, this might be as close as we get in the real world to having superheroes. While the Residents may never have achieved mass appeal, it seems like that might have been a side-effect of keeping their private lives private. Banksy, you've been warned.
RATING: 6 out of 10 sheets of plexiglass
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