Mr. Brainwash (MBW): The Rhetorical Person

I recently watched a documentary on the underground graffiti movement--I think using "movement" is appropriate.  I'm sure most of you have probably seen it: Exit Through The Gift Shop

The film centers on street artists like Invader, Shepard Fairey, and Banksy, but the footage is compiled by a French idiot named Thierry Guetta who stumbles upon this underground movement.  The first half of the film is dedicated to chronicling the underground culture of street art: Guetta follows a series of street artists from city to city.  The second half takes an interesting twist where Banksy asks Guetta to become a street artist himself--to create his own style and persona.  Guetta takes on the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash (fashioned, MBW) and creates a series of street art; eventually, he creates a large scale exhibit of his art which received an unexpected amount of critical and commercial success--despite the documentary's depiction of MBW as an incompetent fool.  After the release of the documentary, some critics believed the character of "Thierry Guetta" was a prank orchestrated by Bansky and Fairey--I would agree with those critics.  Thierry Guetta and the idea of Thierry Guetta is rhetorical.

I'm taking "rhetoric" to mean a motivated discourse which is meant to communicate ideas based on an exigence--a disequilibrium exists, and a discourse is employed to stabilize it (potentially).  The persona of Guetta, or MBW, is created--in my opinion--to combat how artists like Fairey and Banksy--who originally created temporary art under the auspices of a counter-culture--is being marketed as high art.  This can be seen through several subtle examples in the film.

For example, the second half of the film is dedicated to MBW's creation of an exhibit of his street art; however, the exhibit and how MBW leads his exhibit is not typical.  First, Guetta is never seen creating any of the pieces which he has been credited for completing--he has a staff of artists to "help" him generate his art.  From the film, MBW simply accepts or rejects the work of his staff--he only spray paints a few posters throughout the entire film.  Further, MBW's exhibit--as commented by several of his staffers--explain that the massive size of the exhibit is large even if MBW had been a world-renowned and respected artist; even further, his money to pay for the army of staffers, consultants, materials, and space seems to come from thin air considering that he hasn't had a job for the entire documentary.  But also, MBW's comments about his art and his intent in curating his exhibit seem to show that he doesn't have a real sense of his purposes except that this is something he has to do.  While these small inconstancies show how unrealistic it is for Guetta to be a legitimate person, these 

inconsistencies, I believe, are Banksy and Fairey's way to comment on the idea of "High Art," "The Artist," and the inconsistencies between how street art began as a vernacular, underground movement, and to how it has been assimilated into high culture.  

Thierry Guetta is device deployed by Bansky and Fairey to communicate to an exigency that they see existing: low culture being marketed as high culture.  Because of the shift in context, their work is becoming meaningless.  And of course, one of the themes of MBW's exhibit is how art can become meaningless (this, of course, was explained by one of MBW's staffers, not MBW himself).