A big part of what I try to do here is to show how art and science can complement one another. It makes sense to me: artistic talent seems to be X-linked through my family. My sister is a studio artist by training. My mother was an art teacher for a long time until art teacher jobs ran dry in the late 80s. Her mother – my grandmother – was a skilled painter. In possession of that crazy little Y-chromosome, something went haywire and my artistic abilities are limited to drawing crappy cartoons. I was, however, influenced by my grandfathers: an engineer and a physician. And so I am a scientist.
(Though I do not drink nearly as much as Bob Pollard.)
Still, an appreciation for art is a big part of my personality, I think. It translates to being dismayed when the otherwise-level-headed Roger Ebert says some rather regretful things as well as trying to get out of the house and away from my keyboard every now and then to see a decent independent film at the cinema down the road from us in Cambridge. Yesterday we saw the excellent Exit Through the Gift Shop, ostensibly billed as a documentary about street art as produced by the famous yet extraordinarily reclusive British street artist Banksy and including footage of and interviews with a laundry list of globally-recognized street artists, most notable among which in terms of name-recognition as well as contribution to the film was Shepard Fairey, creator of the now-ubiquitous Obama HOPE poster and Andre the Giant Has a Posse/OBEY Giant.
Image credit: Flickr user dullhunk
The film – now screening in most major cities in North America and opening in some more cities later this week – takes a bit of an unexpected turn, though. It starts off being the story of street art as told by French-American amateur videographer Thierry Guetta. The first two-thirds of the movie is carried by Guetta as he tells the story of how he got to know every major street artist in the world – culminating with filming the notoriously hard-to-get Banksy – over a period between 1999 and 2006, recording thousands of hours of footage. Then, as the street art movement started to gain a lot more traction in the public eye as it got coverage in the mainstream media of legitimate art shows, Fairey and Banksy urged Guetta to finally put together his footage into a documentary to re-claim the “street cred” of street art. They felt that the street art movement was starting to lose its moorings as a counter-culture movement and was instead becoming mainstream culture itself, an anathema to their original mission.
After months of work, Guetta showed Banksy the final product of his film, which was, quite honestly, unwatchable. Distressed but not wanting to alienate his by-then good friend, Banksy urged Guetta to leave him with the tapes and “go do some art” on his own in order to distract him while Banksy effectively re-edited the film from square one. He didn’t have a clue, he said, he’d be releasing a monster. Guetta adopted a street art personality called “Mr. Brainwash” and, in a matter of months, had leveraged his life savings into founding a studio of his own churning out pop art at a dizzying pace, all of which was, well… “showing great influence” would be a good way of putting it.
All of this – as now largely explained by Banksy as Guetta (that is, Mr. Brainwash) has now had the camera turned on him – was in anticipation of Mr. Brainwash’s first gallery show – paid for by himself – in his home town of Los Angeles in 2008. After exceptional trepidation, spending every penny to his name and nearly having his entire work force – by the end a small army of artists and laborers – walk out on him, Mr. Brainwash’s debut show opened in grand style, pulling down low 7 figures in sales. Guetta had done that thing you’re not supposed to do – or even supposed to be able to do – he bought his fame. Not only that, he bought it by producing what, to the objective viewer, looked like an alamgam of every notable pop and street artist (including Fairey and Banksy) over the past half-century thrown into a blender and shot across the entire gallery with a fire hose: a little bit of Andy Warhol here, some Roy Lichtenstein there. His style was so incredibly scattershot and manic as to be no style at all; it seemed like what one might imagine a bar in Tokyo themed on western street art might look like. And yet he was able to find instantaneous fame and critical acclaim, even producing the cover art for Madonna’s greatest hits album in 2009. As earnest as Mr. Brainwash was in his desire to create art that overwhelmed his ability to find his own voice in that art, he created an intensely powerful statement about art itself: how what is critically or monetarily valuable and therefore deemed to be culturally valuable can be so subjective as to be completely meaningless. It was a hard lesson in regard to the merits of “paying one’s dues” as opposed to finding instant fame by playing to what’s popular taken to the absolute extreme.
Or… was it? Following its release, rumors have surrounded the film to the effect that the career of Mr. Brainwash wasn’t manufactured by Guetta taking Banksy’s advice to the extreme all on his own, but rather the entire thing was a Kaufmanesque publicity stunt manufactured by Banksy from the inside as a way of illustrating the patent absurdity of publicity stunts. It would turn the film into a sort of documentarian Being There where the joke was not just on the art afficionados who bought up Mr. Brainwash’s products at a premium, not just on the street art community that encouraged him to find his voice and wasn’t happy when they heard it, not just on Banksy and Fairey for unintentionally sponsoring his rise to fame, but on the audience viewing the film, too; the joke is on everyone.
And that’s just the thing, isn’t it? That’s how it ties in here. It seems to me that Banksy’s work is all about the absurdity of valuing art and how any attempt to do so will ultimately culminate in a giant joke on everyone. And I can dig that. Science, you see, exists at the opposite end of things: everything at its core is objective and has the same meaning everywhere in the Universe, forever. Data is open to interpretation but facts are not. Art, though, is on the opposite end of things: you like it or you don’t, and who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong? Sure, there’s things like the Golden Ratio that seem to dictate how aesthetically pleasing something is to us, but that’s more of a guideline, not a rule. What tickles the human brain into releasing the neurotransmitters that encourage an emotional response will be as unique for every individual as that individual is unique his- or herself.
Which is why it’s necessary that art and science work together. Raw facts are immutable and objective, true, but how we interpret and visualize those raw facts are how we, as humans, are able to express our understanding of the Universe and share that understanding with others. Just as Exit Through the Gift Shop illustrates how art for art’s sake is meaningless, science for the sake of science has no language with which it can be converted into culturally transmissible knowledge without art. And so one will always need the other. And so, dear readers, I encourage you to not only use the power of awesome thinking to allow science into your life, but also to use the power of awesome doing through artistic expression to allow for yourself to be seen, heard and understood. Because, really, as far as I can tell, that’s what this whole “life” thing is all about.
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