The 2010 doc­u­men­tary Exit Through the Gift Shop seemed to crit­ics both too con­trived to be real­i­ty and too bizarre to be a hoax: Frenchman-in‑L.A. Thier­ry Guet­ta obses­sive­ly films graf­fi­ti artists and begins pur­su­ing Banksy, who takes over the project and makes a film about Guet­ta, who, at Banksy’s sug­ges­tion, takes up street art, becomes an overnight sen­sa­tion and — to the some­what hor­ri­fied aston­ish­ment of Banksy — sells a mil­lion dol­lars worth of his work at his first show as “Mr. Brain­wash.”

Worth, in the art world, is a rel­a­tive term, as Roger Ebert point­ed out. So what if Guet­ta was doing mediocre riffs on Warhol, among oth­ers? “Sure­ly Warhol’s mes­sage was that Their­ry Guet­ta has an absolute right to call his work art, and sell it for as much as he can.” If he can get away with it, more pow­er to him, but sure­ly there’s a high­er author­i­ty that real­ly deter­mines what we think of as art? Some hon­est body of schol­ars with rig­or­ous stan­dards and gen­er­ous tastes? Sure­ly there’s some­thing more than sales to deter­mine the val­ue of art?

Or maybe, the Vox video above sug­gests, it real­ly is the epony­mous gift shop, whose care­ful­ly curat­ed tchotchkes and sou­venirs include such col­lec­tions as “an ear-shaped eras­er,” writes Micaela Mari­ni Hig­gs, “a $495 Ver­sace t‑shirt… and of course, the clas­sics: post­cards, mugs, and mag­nets.” And that’s not to men­tion all those won­der­ful books…. Muse­um gift shops have con­vinced us that if it sells, it’s art. “Basi­cal­ly, stores are like the ulti­mate cheat sheet — the more you see a piece of art ref­er­enced, the more impor­tant it prob­a­bly is.”

Some vis­i­tors even choose to enter through the gift shop, which may, after all, be no stranger than walk­ing through an exhi­bi­tion the wrong way. Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­o­gy Sharon Mac­don­ald describes the retail area of a muse­um as a show’s final exhib­it. Vis­i­tors may feel a lack if they can’t con­spic­u­ous­ly con­sume what they have seen. The more they do so, the more they act as adver­tise­ments for the art on their tote bags. This is by design, of course.

Muse­um gift shops not only see them­selves as rev­enue sources — some pro­vid­ing up to a quar­ter of an institution’s funds — but also as art edu­ca­tors. Store buy­ers col­lab­o­rate with cura­tors, who want to give poten­tial vis­i­tors a sense of their exhi­bi­tions’ main ideas. There is no sin­is­ter plot at work, only the rein­forc­ing, through com­merce, of the museum’s pre-exist­ing cri­te­ria for what qual­i­fies as impor­tant art. But you might see a prob­lem — it’s all a bit cir­cu­lar, isn’t it? — and thanks to the “mere-expo­sure effect,” the cir­cle rip­ples out­ward through repeat­ed view­ings.

It’s a phe­nom­e­non not unlike hear­ing the same song over and over on the radio and grow­ing to like it through sheer famil­iar­i­ty. Do we “appre­ci­ate” art by con­sum­ing its like­ness­es on key­chains and mousepa­ds? Maybe we’re also par­tic­i­pat­ing in a rit­u­al of com­mer­cial con­sent to the val­ue of cer­tain works over oth­ers, most­ly unaware of how over­priced gift shop swag meme-ifies art and ampli­fies cul­tur­al val­ues we could think about more crit­i­cal­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards, Cook­book & Wine Guide Re-Issued as Beau­ti­ful Art Books

Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Break­down of the Artist’s Self-Shred­ding Paint­ing

Down­load 584 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Hierony­mus Bosch Fig­urines: Col­lect Sur­re­al Char­ac­ters from Bosch’s Paint­ings & Put Them on Your Book­shelf

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It would be dif­fi­cult to think of two artists who appear to have less in com­mon than Bob Ross and Banksy. One of them cre­ates art by pulling provoca­tive stunts, often ille­gal, under the cov­er of anonymi­ty; the oth­er did it by paint­ing innocu­ous land­scapes on pub­lic tele­vi­sion, spend­ing a decade as one of its most rec­og­niz­able per­son­al­i­ties. But game rec­og­nize game, as they say, in pop­u­lar art as in oth­er fields of human endeav­or. In the video above, Banksy pays trib­ute to Ross by lay­er­ing nar­ra­tion from an episode of The Joy of Paint­ing over the cre­ation of his lat­est spray paint strike, Cre­ate Escape: an image of Oscar Wilde, type­writer and all, break­ing out jail — on the actu­al exte­ri­or wall of the decom­mis­sioned HM Prison Read­ing.

“The expan­sive and unblem­ished prison wall was a dar­ing and per­fect spot for a Banksy piece,” writes Colos­sal’s Christo­pher Job­son. “It’s best known for its most famous inmate: Oscar Wilde served two years in the prison from 1895–1897 for the charge of ‘gross inde­cen­cy’ for being gay.” This expe­ri­ence result­ed in the poem The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture as read by Wilde him­self.

Where Wilde con­vert­ed his mis­for­tune into ver­bal art, Banksy ref­er­ences it to make a visu­al state­ment of char­ac­ter­is­tic brazen­ness and ambi­gu­i­ty. As with most of his recent pieces, Cre­ate Escape has clear­ly been designed to be seen not just by passers­by in Read­ing, but by the whole world online, which The Joy of Paint­ing with Bob Ross & Banksy should ensure.

“I thought we’d just do a very warm lit­tle scene that makes you feel good,” says Ross in voiceover. But what we see are the hands of a min­er’s-hel­met­ed Banksy, pre­sum­ably, prepar­ing his spray cans and putting up his sten­cil of Wilde in an inmate’s uni­form. “Lit­tle bit of white,” says Ross as a streak of that col­or is applied to the prison wall. “That ought to light­en it just a lit­tle.” In fact, every sam­ple of Ross’ nar­ra­tion reflects the action, as when he urges thought “about shape and form and how you want the limbs to look,” or when he tells us that “a nice light area between the darks, it sep­a­rates, makes every­thing real­ly stand out and look good.” With his sig­na­ture high-con­trast style, Banksy could hard­ly deny it, and he would seem also to share Ross’ feel­ing that in paint­ing, “I can cre­ate the kind of world that I want to see, and that I want to be part of.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

Expe­ri­ence the Bob Ross Expe­ri­ence: A New Muse­um Open in the TV Painter’s For­mer Stu­dio Home

Banksy Strikes Again in Lon­don & Urges Every­one to Wear Masks

Banksy Debuts His COVID-19 Art Project: Good to See That He Has TP at Home

Hear Oscar Wilde Recite a Sec­tion of The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol (1897)

Pat­ti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Let­ter De Pro­fundis: See the Full Three-Hour Per­for­mance

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Bel­gian painter René Magritte cre­at­ed some of the most enig­mat­ic and icon­ic works in Sur­re­al­ist art. But before he moved to Paris in 1927 and began forg­ing rela­tion­ships with André Bre­ton and the Sur­re­al­ists, Magritte strug­gled in Brus­sels as a free­lance com­mer­cial artist, cre­at­ing adver­tise­ments in the Art Deco style.

In 1924 Magritte began design­ing posters and adver­tise­ments for the cou­turi­er Hon­orine “Norine” Deschri­jver and her hus­band Paul-Gus­tave Van Hecke, own­ers of the Bel­gian fash­ion com­pa­ny Norine. Van Hecke also owned art gal­leries, and was an ear­ly cham­pi­on of sur­re­al­ism. Van Hecke would even­tu­al­ly pay Magritte a stipend in exchange for the right to mar­ket his sur­re­al­ist works. In the 1924 adver­tis­ing poster above, Magritte por­trays a woman in high heels pre­tend­ing to be Lord Lis­ter, the gen­tle­man thief from Ger­man pulp fic­tion, wear­ing “an after­noon coat cre­at­ed by Norine.”

Magritte designed some 40 sheet music cov­ers, most of them in the Art Deco style, accord­ing to Hrag Var­tan­ian at Hyper­al­ler­gic. The one above, “Arli­ta,” is from about 1925. The French and Dutch sub­ti­tles read “The Song of Light.”

The har­le­quin-themed image above is anoth­er adver­tise­ment for Norine, cir­ca 1925. Magritte paint­ed it in water­col­or and gouache. The pen­ciled inscrip­tion at the bot­tom reads “une robe du soir par Norine” — “an evening gown by Norine.”

In 1926 Magritte was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the poster above for the pop­u­lar singer Marie-Louise Van Eme­len, bet­ter known as Primevère. For more of Magrit­te’s Art Deco sheet music cov­ers, vis­it Hyper­al­ler­gic.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dozens of M.C. Esch­er Prints Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Boston Pub­lic Library

Philoso­pher Por­traits: Famous Philoso­phers Paint­ed in the Style of Influ­en­tial Artists

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series