MR. BRAINWASH

  Mr. Brainwash (Thierry Guetta) is a Street Artist & filmmaker who started out following and documenting other street artists at work. He was introduced to doing street art himself by his cousin 'Invader'. Fame came with his first solo exhibition in 2008 which is considered one of Los Angeles' most memorable solo art shows, and, even more so when the Banksy directed documentary "Exit Through The Gift Shop"was released in 2010.

  Although, brainwash doesn't physically create the work himself, he does design it, like an architect would design a building but wouldn't build it himself, he has a creative mind, but, Guetta doesn't enter my definition of street artist. The original idea of street art has that rough feeling of clandestinity, that guerrilla touch of, almost, delinquency, a movement that started as graffiti; an illegal and prosecuted activity that was done at night by mob of angry youth, it was done to express the discontent of young people marginalised in a society with no spaces for them. It's only in recent years that the talent of graffiti makers was recognised and it became art in a different form to the mainstream form of art moving from "vandals" to "artists". It seems that Mr Brainwash is a talented man, an artist that took advantage of the popularity of street art and tried to gain a place amongst the real street artists such Banksy, Invader, Malarkey, etc.

  Street art, like the cave works of Altamira (Spain) about 40.000 years ago, is done just to express the artist feelings. One imagines that it was done from the soul, maybe in anger or to shout out to other people how happy they were, but, when an artist starts planing a work with a mentality of profiting from it and calculating how much "fame" they can get then the definition of street artist may no longer apply to that artist, and it is for this reason that Mr Brainwash although talented, perhaps should try his wares as a mainstream artist rather than pretending to be a street artist.