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For those of you who are curious, the "documentary" Exit Through the Gift Shop is absolutely brilliant and definitely worth watching. I'm not educated enough o

• mturmon 15y ago
  Don't feel bad -- it's hard for anyone to say to what degree Guetta is a hoax. Certainly Guetta is a real person who has been in LA making his own art under the MBW name for years. This is reasonably well-known, as the article you link to notes. What's harder to tell is (1) to what degree Banksy and Shepard Fairey are behind the making of the MBW art work, and (2) to what degree the movie was shot by MBW and just arranged by Banksy as was claimed in the movie. About (1), of course Guetta does not do all the MBW work. Lots of artists use fabricators; this is even shown in the movie. So in order to answer (1), all the sudden you're down in the details of which particular pieces Guetta did do, what percentage, whatever. Booo-ring. You can ask very well-informed people who have followed the LA art scene for years (relatives hounded my wife to ask her friend, the editor of http://coagula.com/ http://coagula.com/) and they can't fully answer these questions. Also, they don't want spend energy to find the answer, because the uncertainty is part of the point. "Outsiders" seem to really want to know, however, perhaps because it will make them "insiders" in their own minds.