I'm not sure who the joke's on

So said Banky's ex-spokesman in the fabulous documentary on Street Art, Exit through the Gift Shop, shown tonight on 4.

It told the tale of the mad-cap French dweeb Thierry Guetta who mortgages his house to shoot a thousand tapes of film in the company of LA street artists. He hangs out with Shepard Fairey, his French cousin Space Invader and... eventually... Banksy. And so begins his transformation from loony hanger-on to multi-million dollar artist as he believes his own hype and rips off the stylistic innovations of his idols. His show in LA, "Life is Beautiful" by Mister Brainwash, became enormous and left Banksy, amongst others, to lament his seemingly precocious, johnny-come-lately commercial epiphany.

But the beauty of the film is that Guetta simply played their games harder, faster and with more daring than any of the others but with less integrity - it leaves Banksy literally saying "he didn't play by the rules [beat] But, then, there aren't meant to be any rules"...

For anyone who has walked round a modern art gallery wondering who the con is on it is refreshing to know that even at modern art's funkiest (and to my simple mind, best) edge the question about its real worth is unanswerable even to its practicioners.

[Exit through the Gift Shop was directed by Banksy which shows, I suppose, that after all he remains in charge of both the moral & artistic high ground given how impressive his work, his film-making & his awareness really is.]