David Wagner

In his philosophy of art, Arthur C. Danto proposes that essentialist definitions of art finally met their match with the appearance of indiscernibles, e.g. Duchamp’s ready-mades or Warhol’s »Brillo« boxes. Danto’s strategy therefore consists in a definition of art that prescinds from phenomenal qualities: How something looks cannot be an essential feature of its ontological status as art.

Any condensed history of art will probably tell the story of how the problem of verisimilitude in painting ended with the invention of photography. This is common knowledge: Modernist painters discovered new ways of expression and rather than dealing with the problem of how to copy reality – a problem seemingly solved by the indexicality of photographic realism – opened their paintings up to self-reflexive strategies. The medium of film is often considered as further development of photography’s inherent truth-to-nature: More realism due to the added qualities of motion and sound.

Focusing on Banksy’s self-reflective mockumentary »EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP« (UK 2010) I want to ask the question, how the indiscernibility of this film’s persuasiveness to »authentic« documentaries may affect our thinking about cinematic realism. The indiscernibility in this case consists in the fact that Banksy’s film is no less believable than any documentary film. I think of films generally as art works in Danto’s sense: They are embodied meanings and require interpretation. Both, mockumentaries and documentaries, stand in a specific relation to reality. They thus present us with the problem of realism. (This is true even if one claims that they generate their own reality or that they are part of our everyday world.) – I intend to explore the means by which Banksy’s destruction of visual verisimilitude and withholding of information add to his film’s persuasive power.

David Wagner is a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and at the Department of Film-, Theatre- and Media-Studies (tfm) of the University of Vienna. He completed his Master- and Ph.D.-degrees in Philosophy in Vienna after previous studies in Visual Communication at AIU London (B.A.) and Film- and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, London. Apart from working for Vienna’s research platform »Tracing Wittgenstein«, his studies so far have dealt with aspects of the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. His current interests lie in aesthetics, film theory, as well as the philosophy of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.