If you haven't seen the film it is about the very unbelievable circumstances that allow a Frenchman obsessed with filming everything to become a part of the secretive, underground street art scene in the 90's and early 2000's. In the end this man uses his connections with established street artists who had been successful enough to cross over into the mainstream art world, such as Shepard Fairey and Banksy, to catapult himself into the limelight as a legitimate and sought after artist.
At the end Shepard Fairey talks about the whole experience as an interesting anthropological study on the art world and the influence of promotion and perceived greatness on the success of an individual. The "hype" surrounding an artist can speak louder than his or her actual art. The New Yorker review of the movie describes it as such, "The joke is that he (the Frenchman) has no discernible gift, save a knack for self-advertisement; the more depressing joke is that this crumb of talent turns out to be enough. He calls himself Mr. Brainwash, and fills an abandoned television studio with sub-Warholian dreck of his own devising. Art scavengers, lured by the smell of publicity, line up, open the jaws of their wallets, and feast" (April 26, 2010, p. 79).
This quote is exactly why the movie conjured images from the Armory Show. People with money flocking to purchase something that will give them status. In particular, I remember watching an art collector discuss which two colors of the Damien Hirst skull prints would look best together. Because, god forbid, if one were to spend thousands of dollars on matching screen prints of a skull they better match and not be too feminine. How hip and "with-it" they will be with their original Damien Hirst prints (that cost a fortune)! People will buy anything that they believe will help them to be perceived in the specific ways they desire to be perceived.
Another astonishingly poignant point that Anthony Lane makes in his New Yorker review of the film is thus, "'Exit Through the Gift Shop' feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult--almost, dare one say it, of a brand. Nothing by Banksy or his acolytes would have been remotely alarming to Marcel Duchamp, or to Tristan Tzara; what would have struck them was the means by which a Banksy image can be reproduced--the sudden velocity at which its impact can travel, whether online or through the eyes of a hundred cell phones."
In light of this perspective, and to return to McLuhan's argument that the medium is the message...in this time of cell phone cameras and instant ability to share images, can the medium still be the message? The minute an image is captured in a digital photograph and sent across the world the image is no longer attached or associated with its original medium. It now exists in a new medium, and thus, it must have a new message. So street art metamorphoses from an attempt to add aesthetic to an everyday object into a semi-brand in the time it takes to snap a photograph.
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