I could watch Exit at the Gift Shop in seven different ways. Taken straight and (over)simply, it is a story about economies of art and the role mediation by documentarians online, in print, and in film can play. Another way, it’s like Las Meninas, placing you as the viewer of the process of producing representation, but you’re the one being addressed and the painter is the subject despite the pretty girls ostensibly in the middle. Watching a story about the cultural economy of street art desperately made me want to watch an ethnography of ethnographers — maybe George Marcus or some other avant-tenured-professor is already on this? — a story that puts the storyteller in the frame as something more than just a reflexive footnote about the storytellers point of view made in passing.

And I’ll just tack this on: Banksy said this in a handout at his LA show: 

“1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?” 

Viscerally, this reminded me of academic work.