Method vs. Madness

The Italian anti-advertising group Be Yourself Movement has raised eyebrows across Europe in recent months with a series of public art works condemning the prevalence of advertising in the public domain.  The groups’ irreverent cut and paste tactics literally set out to beat advertisers at their own game, using existing advertisements as a canvas for their message.

Much in the style of the New York guerilla artist Poster Boy, the Be Yourself Movement’s work repurposes existing billboards and subway ads with messages that challenge the ubiquity of advertising in the public domain. In doing so, the group’s humorous and incendiary critiques of advertising’s role in our everyday lives reveal a deeper question in the perennial debate between art, branding and commerce: how capitalists and anti-capitalists, brands and artists must often use the same outlets and the same tactics to get their messages out to the wider public. The result is a a blurred line between the seemingly oppositional stance taken guerilla artists and corporate brands.

Watch:

With a series of videos on Youtube and a savvy online presence,  the Be Yourself Movement’s message has gone viral and has earned them an audience well beyond the confines of their local metro.  Followers can keep tabs of the group’s actions via Facebook, Youtube and a website where visitors can download and print their own BYM “ammo”– graphics and slogans supporting the group’s message that in turn can be plastered on the streets and subways of their own cities. Not a bad campaign strategy for an supposedly anti-marketing collective.

The interesting thing to me about all of this is how much BYM’s message and tactics mirror those employed by many creative agencies working in today’s ad industry.  Case and point:  Diesel’s “Be Stupid” campaign, which gets rebuffed in the video seen above.   Developed by the New York based boutique agency Anomaly, these billboards, as well as the campaign’s website and social media presence, encourage its audience break loose of convention, to pursue a lifestyle  of self-expression, liberation and other loosely defined social mores.  Much like the BYM message, “Be Stupid” is chock full of utopian ideals aimed at setting us free from an ever-present (but really hard to define) establishment.   It’s a call to arms for people to reclaim control over their minds, bodies and shared public spaces. To stop thinking and start doing.

These ideas are, of course, far from new. The debate over the limits (or lack thereof) of advertising in our public spaces is as old as the ad industry itself. It’s also a debate in which the line dividing each opposing side has never been as blurred as it is today. I’ve written business plans for ad agencies that read practically the same as the Be Yourself Movement’s anti-ad manifesto:

“We’re tired of feeling like numbers, of our generation being seen as a target and of our behaviour being measured as a market trend…

We believe in and promote the development of an individual and collective critical conscience and we aim for it to be respected.”

and so on and so forth.

This is the conundrum that arises when agitprop rebellion meets rebellious marketing tactics (Diesel’s got a long track record of this kind of work). For me, this tension drives some of the best creative thinking of our time.  At its best, the creative tension between those working in advertising and those working against it holds the potential to produce some of the most stirring work- be it an ad, a magazine, a street mural or a novel.  Unfortunately, there’s a lot of trickery that takes place in this debate, mostly on the side of advertisers. There’s a long history of Ad-execs and Creative Directors co-opting the tactics of graffiti writers and turning  what was once  criminalized behavior into their own corporate-sanctioned cash cow, while the original writers are left to starve. This is just one example.  The work of Shephard Fairey is another, perhaps more positive spin of this tale. The fact remains that the line between corporate imagery and street art has long been blurred under the conditions of 21st century capitalism and in many ways represents one of the definitive aspects of art of our time.  Some of our greatest rebels have benefited from this and become brands in and of themselves.  Many have fought to resist this commodification. Others still simply don’t give a fuck and have managed to use this capitalist/ anti-capitalist tension to their (and their audience’s benefit).   It’s this third category I’m most interested in at the moment.

Related Audio: “Subway Theme,” From the Wild Style motion picture soundtrack

Be Yourself Movement