Theirry Guetta aka Mister Brainwash, in my opinion, is a joke. I love his enthusiasm about the whole street art thing, but when he went to do a show, that love stopped.
Many, if not all artists, have to go through some type of struggle, and all of them have to have some type of meaning behind their work. With Theirry, he just said, 'I'm gonna make art and do a show'. Though that's what Banksy told him to do, I think he took it too far. What Banksy meant was to do some street art. That's it. But the eccentric french man wanted to make street artists proud, so he skipped the phase where people get to know who he is and what his art stands for, he just massed produced art and put it in a show. A big show.
Mister Brainwash says that his art is supposed to brainwash people. I don't think it does. I think it is an insult to all of those who take weeks, months and years to create something with the right message. He doesn't even make it himself! He hires others to do things together. A scene in the documentary that really shows this insult to art is when Theirry had to make a hundred posters for the first people to come to his art show. To make each poster 'unique' he lined up the posters, and was pushed around, while he sprayed paint everywhere. There was no thought to the picture. It's just an example of one guy, taken advantage of others by mass production.
As I said, Theirry only comes up with the idea of what the art should look like. I think that many of his pieces are about celebrities and famous movie characters. He does try to put a message with his... art by substituting a somewhat fantasy appeal to the image. An example would be the image of a movie character (who is known to use guns) and substituting the real gun for a toy gun. That was a pretty interesting piece, but it gets a little boring when you do the same image over and over but in different colors. This use of color variation can be seen the picture of the spray can. Sure it looks nice, but I don't see anything else but a colorful can, and he uses this image over and over again.; Not in a Warhol way, but in a 'I don't know what color I should so I'm going to use them all' kind of way.
Theirry's art show was also a bit of a mess too. It got to the point where there were so many pieces of art that it loses value. I think by making millions of paintings and such just to fill in the space, he really deminished the value of each independent piece. Even though he was able to sell his work for thousands, I don't believe that Theirry understood what Banksy wanted him to do. This was to go through the process of doing street art for the meaning and then see where it takes him. Though he did do some street art, he did not spread his name out. He just said that he was going straight to the top.
At the end of the documentary, Banksy compared Mister Brainwash to Andy Warhol. It is an interesting comparison as he talks about how both men create the same image over and over again. The difference with Warhol is that he did it with the message of the impact of mass production in America. This was not the case with Mister Brainwash as his reasoning for mass producing art was , in my opinion, to just fill up space and sell to many people for a lot of money.
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