Street Artist or a Phony?
Becoming a popular street artist seems like it would take a while for one person to
become an artist and find their style and personality in the street art world. But it wasn’t
like that for Theirry, the main character in the video “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”
Because of how quickly Theirry became a street artist, I ask myself the question, is
Theirry a true street artist? According to Gee, being in a Discourse, with a capital “d,”
you have to have values, feelings, and beliefs while dealing with tools, technologies,
objects, and other people (Discourses and Literacies 155). In the video, “Exit Through
the Gift Shop,” Theirry didn’t value what the other street artists valued. Other street
artists, like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, believed that street art was more about their
identity, their work, credibility, and implicature and that’s what they valued about street
art. But Theirry valued the money and the hype rather than his own work. To me, this
seems like Thierry is more of an entrepreneur than a street artist. Entrepreneurs are more
concerned with the money and the hype they get from selling their work, which is exactly
what Theirry did.
Another reason I believe Theirry is not a true street artist is because it takes a
while for well-known, popular street artists to come up with their own type of style and
creativity. In the video, Theirry pretty much just takes old, famous paintings and pictures
or random objects and makes them into pop-culture art, such as adding some silly object
on the painting/picture or multiplying the number of pictures there is in the piece. He
doesn’t really take the time to find his own style, he just goes off of what he saw other
street artists art from when he filmed them. Theirry also tries to create an art gallery to
sell his art on his own, only because he saw other street artists do it and he wanted to do
the same thing. That’s not really how it’s supposed to work in the street art world, but
Theirry does it anyways. He’s an amateur trying to be like other street artists.
The last reason why I believe that Theirry is not a true street artist is because he
goes from one Discourse to another. In the beginning of “Exit Through the Giftshop,”
Theirry sold “vintage” clothing to get money. After he stopped that, he become a
filmmaker and filmed different street artists. And after that, he became a street artist.
For most of his street life career, he’s been an entrepreneur, only concerned about the
money. Swales tells us that you have to be put in a certain category of the discourse to be
apart of that discourse (The Concept of Discourse Community 471). For example, one of
the categories that Swales says you have to be apart of is “A discourse community uses
its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback” (The
Concept of Discourse Community 472). Theirry doesn’t get any feedback because he
does it all on his own. He didn’t ask for anyone else’s opinion to help improve his art so
that he could become a better street artist. Another example is when Swales says “A
discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals” (The Concept of
Discourse Community 471). This connects back with what other street artists valued and
believed and then what Theirry valued and believed. Theirry had a different set of goals
than other street artists. All he cared about was the money and the hype while other street
artists were more concerned with their identity and their work. This proves that Theirry
was not a true street artist because he did not have common goals with real street artists.
His goals were completely what other street artists said street art wasn’t about. Because
of this, other street artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey question if street art is a
joke or not.