Street Art and Selling Out: Can Authenticity Be Cool?
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 10:34AM Mystique.
This is something I do not have.
I'm earnest. I used to work at PBS, for Pete's sake. I'm a vegetarian. I practice yoga. There is nothing edgy about me.
To wit: I do not know about the latest indie band.
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Then, there's Banksy.
Do you know about Banksy? He's a street artist who rose to celebrity status thanks to a series of highly visible political pranks, like planting a blow-up doll of a Guantanamo prisoner at Disneyland, and painting a provocative series of images on Israel's West Bank wall (which The Guardian chronicles, here). Exposure on The Simpsons didn't hurt, either. Banksy also produced the 2010 film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which is generating significant Oscar buzz.
One of Banksy's West Bank paintingsCan you still be a credible critic of mainstream, commercial culture if you're worshipped by the Establishment? How about if the people you ridicule pay you millions for your work?
I ask these questions as a yogi and writer who is deeply committed to living an authentic life, and also as an avid student of media and culture. How free are we to be our authentic selves, and how is that freedom influenced by the forces of media, culture... and the money that flows through both?
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I've casually followed the world of street art for a few years now, almost completely via The Wooster Collective, a website that's widely considered the definitive chronicle of street art from around the world. It thrills me to see the gorgeous and inventive ways in which artists around the world find ways to interrupt public life with subversive political statements (something that's also known as "culture jamming" - to learn more about culture jamming, check out the website for Adbusters, which calls itself "culturejammer headquarters").
I know, what street artists do is against the law... but so much about our commercial culture offends me (for example, the billions of dollars that advertisers spend in an attempt to control our minds and behaviors), that I find myself cheering for those who dare to provide a counter-message. It gives me hope that there's space for authenticity in a culture dominated by commerce.
(Despite its earnest image, counter-programming is in fact what PBS -- and, more generally, public media -- is all about, in my book: Providing alternative images and stories to the commercial ones that flood our world. Now, whether or not public media always achieves this vision, is a subject for another post.)
It strikes me that the more media attention Banksy receives, the more it feels like he's trying to taunt the media, rather than simply express his cultural dissent. I realize I'm making a lot of assumptions here about his motivations...but it seems like this tension between original artistic impulse, and calculated manipulation of audience (including media), is the central tension of Exit Through the Gift Shop.
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It's always bothered me that the people who run The Wooster Collective work in advertising. It strikes me as hypocritical, to devote so much of your life to celebrating something as subversive as street art, on the one hand, and then to make a living perpetuating commercial culture. Are you an insider or an outsider? Can you authentically be both?
But maybe that's a clue to the truth about street art. Maybe it's never been as earnest as I imagine. Maybe the artists' motivations have always been cloudy, or at least some of the artist's motivations. Or maybe the simple act of trying to appreciate a subculture from the outside, inevitably turns the subculture into a commodity to the outsider.
Maybe the artist's intentions don't matter. Maybe authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.
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We are drawn to mystique. Celebrities fascinate us because we don't know them, and the lives they lead are not familiar to us. Underground art movements capture our imaginations, because they promise that there is more to life than meets the eye.
The grass is always greener... and so we peer, always, over the fence.
But what if we decided to value the familiar?
What if everything, and everyone, right around us, was fascinating?
What if Banksy could be cool, even if he was a dorky suburban dad, as he's imagined in the video below? (Note, I found this video on Banksy's website.)
How can we create more value for authenticity in our culture, and in our own lives?
Photo above via bigshinything.com
Reader Comments (16)
a wonderful question. i appreciate a good tv commercial. i know i'm stuck with them, and i'm a happy camper when i see a clever or creative one. there is nothing authentic about a tv commercial, but every now and then they can be art.
in other news, a lot of the old, "authentic" music i listen to is not as authentic as we think it is. in the 1920s, record producers found down-home guys and encouraged them to play up the rural, outsider nature of their sound...because there was a big market for that sort of sound. this wasn't always the case, but it did happen with some musicians.
listening back in the day, you'd hear a deliberate attempt to evoke authenticity. but today, can we tell the difference between the real down-home guys and the ones that are playing it up? not without a lot of effort...
The question that struck me the most was, "How free are we to be our authentic selves, and how is that freedom influenced by the forces of media, culture... and the money that flows through both?" I think my biggest challenge is just knowing who my "authentic self" is amidst all of the these forces. Even when I am making a concerted effort not to be swayed by all of the images constantly parading by, I find myself flocking towards the latest this and that. Facebook, Twitter, blogging and the like open up the influencing to every casual acquaintance we befriend along the way. Am I less authentic because who I am and what I care about, at least on a surface level, is so easily shaped (and reshaped) by the relentless barrage of info about what everyone else thinks? Probably. All the more reason to have a quieter, dare I say less plugged in, year.
Dave, I love the idea of fake authenticity....don't people accuse Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) of the same thing? It's tempting to say "Well then, an artist's intentions don't matter, just deal with the art," but something inside me fights that tooth and nail... I think intention matters a LOT. But I also think it's often un-knowable. So, what to do with that conundrum?!
I sure don't know.
Like you, I really feel like intentions matter in art...but of course unelss I'm the one making the art, I really can't say that I have any true idea what the artist's intentions were when I'm looking at a piece of art or listening to music, etc. I'd like to think I could tell just by listening to the music who "really meant it" and who was just cashing in, but I know enough to know that I really can't know.
Your Kurt Cobain reference is very apropos - the perils of an artist dealing with mainstream success...how commercial success not only changes the cultural meaning of the art, but also changes the artist him/herself. Changes/f*cks up.... I wonder, are there any examples of commercial success changing an artist for the better? There must be, yet none are coming to mind....
I really like this: "subcultures are discovered, cleaned up, marketed, and sold before they even have time to grow and change into more fully realized expressions." Exactly. Again, the blurring line between art and marketing. We see this in youth culture especially. Now I sound like an old lady professor and so I will stop typing.
In the end, we can only strive to be ourselves and to express ourselves as best we can. But who we are is always changing, by virtue of new experiences, changed circumstances in our lives, and the types of interactions we have with people. For someone who achieves a certain amount of fame through art, achieving that fame will change their art because true art has to reflect a person's world view in some way. And the work that comes out of a change like that will be judged in relation to previous work... with such judgment necessarily influencing the creative impulse for work still to come.
For artists out of the public eye, you can strive to be yourself, but who you are will necessarily change. The person you are at 20 is different from the person you are at 30, and neither is truly inauthentic, they're just... different. And if who we are changes with time, then canwe _ever_ be our authentic selves, or are we just always searching for the newest, most up to date us amdist a backdrop of previous iterations?
I do think that the necessity to live and, therefore, the necessity to make money, pulls people away from more pure expressions of artistic impulses, but I also think that it opens up opportunities for new types of art and new forms of expression. The real trick is finding a balance between living one's life and expressing oneself that allows one to do both without feeling artistically compromised; that's a balance that can only be defined by the individual. We can question someone's choice and believe that we would have chosen differently, but ultimately the only choice of balance that we get to make is our own.
And as far as valuing authenticity, I think we ARE seeing a greater valuation of it as social media/interaction grows. As people become more sophisticated consumers of media, we become immune to the usual corporate/advertising speak. Witness the reaction to the BP's response to the oil spill: people demanded real answers over bland speech; real action over placation. Witness the transition pains in the media industry as the ad-supported content model weakens. People are demonstrably hungry for content so why is the model weakening? Because consumers aren't responding to advertising online which in turn devalues the medium to advertisers. Of course this has other consequences. How do support the content that we value?
Love the question you raise about the "tension between original artistic impulse, and calculated manipulation of audience" and whether art that's pulled in these two opposing directions can be authenic. It definitely got me thinking.
I think there are actually two smaller questions here. The first is whether or not the artist can still be authentic and the second is, can that art still be authentically appreciated?
The second part of the question is easier for me, and it is definitely, emphatically, yes. My feeling is, if art (or anything really) provokes an honest reaction in someone, then that thing becomes honest. Take Mormonism, for example. Joseph Smith was a con-man and there's a good chance the religion he founded was an elaborate con. But because it's resonated with something truthful for its followers, and practiced genuinely by them, the religion itself becomes genuine. I'm of the opinion that where people are honestly looking for God they will find God, and where people are looking for truth they will find that too because these things are meant to be found. Which is I think what you're getting at when you say, " Maybe the artist's intentions don't matter. Maybe authenticity is in the eye of the beholder"
As for the first part of the question - can the creator still be authentic - I think the answer is still yes, but less emphatically so. You say that street artists' "motivations have always been cloudy," but I would go so far to say that that line is cloudy for ALL artists. That tension between artistic impulse and audience manipulation is always there. On one hand, art - authentic art - is supposed to be created for oneself; it's supposed come from a deeply personal place, a passion so vital it must be expressed. On the other, I can't think of a medium of art that's NOT supposed to be shared with and appreciated by an audience. (I think a lot about this especially as a theater artist, where the art doesn't even EXIST unless shared with an audience). That is the whole point of art, I think, to share something that's yours with someone else. And I think anyone who tells you they never consider the "someone else" part of the equation - how they will interpret it, if they will like it - and doesn't, in some part, shape their work for them, is lying.