The British street artist Banksy is notoriously mercurial and elusive but he has the knack of getting his work noticed. In 2014 he did some of his ‘guerrilla art’ in New York. As part of this he (one presumes he is a he) set up a public artwork or a street piece every day for a month all over the city.

This short doco tells the story of these installations and their reception, and how a bunch of trendies and art-followers made it into a sort scavenger hunt. Banksy can claim to have some authentic roots in the street art/graffiti underground tradition. The paradox – as he himself fully appreciates – is that by becoming successful (and highly prized) he has to fight hard to get back to that space where his original art came from.

Of course he has already visited this paradox in a previous film, the mischievously named Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) in which he appears giving interviews but only in disguise. All this is conscious. He has deliberately hung on to this idea of having no conventional identity (real name/identifiable face etc.) partly to keep the focus on the work and its meanings. The longer this goes on, the more tension there is around the whole idea of paradox of the non-artist/artist.

The film itself is playful and quite fun. To be fair it is also a bit slight – really they could have made the same point in an hour long slot. There is also something off putting about the selfie-obsessed (sic) fans that latch on the gimmick and rush around looking for the next piece. Many of them behave in such a stereotypical ‘New Yorker’ style. Basically they behave as if they are enacting reality TV versions of themselves. That is partly the corrupting influence of the camera of course and of peoples’ desperate attempt to grab their 15 minutes of fame.

Fortunately Banksy is smarter and more interesting than these fans, and he manages still to orchestrate a wide range of happenings and stunts and events that are knowing and though-provoking. Understandably some of them work better than others, but the best are both clever and arresting. In one sequence they get a cattle truck driving around the city within which we glimpse desperate muppet-style cows and sheep. As one wag tweets (new media are all part of the shtick now of course), I will never eat puppet meat again!

The other issue that runs like a fault line beneath this whole phenomenon is the question of how price is related to value and quality in postmodern art world. While ‘artists’ like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons chase the dollar shamelessly, Banksy is again more subversive. For example, he sets up a little street stall and gets an old man to sell original works for about $60. The old man only sells a few in whole day but those works could actually re-sell for more than $200,000. However, to regret that one did not snap up one of those ‘bargains’ whilst thinking only about the profit margin and not the art itself is precisely to miss the point of what Banksy is about in the first place.

He’s a sly one alright.

// JULIAN WOOD

Previewed at The Reel Room, Sydney, on 13 April 2015