With amazing, nail-on-the-head insight that transcended the usual Q and A stuff I did for profiles one of the things that Swoon said that stuck in my head was her motive and manifesto for doing street art.
She said "{Grafiti is} A way to change your city with your bare hands. A way to change someone’s day on their way to and from a routine. A way to participate. A beautiful collage. A massively vulnerable act, masked as aggression." Wow.
The danger, passion, risk and sheer effort it took to pull off their acts of beauty (that was, in its very nature, an art form that would likely disappear next week or when the wall owner decided to repaint) stunned me.
Recently my co-editor recommended I watch the Banksy docu on the history on the movement and so I downloaded that shit (thank you, Lord, for the gift of peer to peer file exchange -- or perhaps more aptly, thank you, Sean Parker, for the seed) right away.
EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP isn't just a documentary on the history, gestation and current state of the street art movement and the outlaw curation of urban spaces, it's also a cautionary tale about creative shortcuts and how art can at once be so misunderstood and appropriated by the people closest to it and those with the best intentions.
In short: this is mind-blasting stuff. You should watch it. It is wasak. You don't even need to like street art and graffiti to appreciate it, though I dare say it takes a lot not to be moved by a BANKSY piece.
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