Banksy, BP, Boycotts

The street artist known as Banksy, already ludicrously famous, is having a heck of a summer, thanks largely to the release of his film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Perhaps because of the success of that film, the notoriously shadowy artist is starting to step out into the public eye. 

Last week, he put up a video on his website that showed someone -- whom some speculate was Banksy himself -- heckling Prince Charles as the heir to the British throne was leaving the Glastonbury festival. He also put up a short video, called "Pier Pressure", showing a young girl down on the Brighton Pier riding a dolphin that was stuck in a net as it tried to jump a barrel of BP oil:

And then over the weekend, the Sun ran what it said was the first ever lengthy interview with Banksy. 

What strikes me about the interview (and other statements he's made over the years) is the contrast between the almost completely apolitical manner in which he frames his art, and the somewhat cheap political points he is occasionally inclined to score in his work (such as in the pointless dolphin video above). 

What seems to drive Banksy's work is the playfulness of street art and the use of stencils to poke fun at authorities and official society. He never seems to descend into the seriousness of high politics that too many insecure artists fall into when they want to be taken seriously. For instance, here he is explaining his decision to stage a show in Los Angeles:

 "I guess I fancied going somewhere a little bit warmer. So we ended up in Los Angeles and, yer know, it's this really glamorous town that also has this dirty side to it. But... above anything else it's the easiest place in the world to rent an elephant." 

But now he seems to be on a bit of an environmental kick, in which case, it's too bad. It isn't that art and politics should not mix, but just that art -- especially the type of art Banksy makes -- does not lend itself to the nuances and complexities  environmental politics. For example, should we boycott BP? It's not obvious that it's a useful thing. 

Is BP responsible for the mess in the gulf? Yes, in some ways. But as Chris MacDonald has argued, it's complicated. Is a boycott the best way of punishing BP? Well, it depends. First off, what are your alternatives? If you're going to get picky about where your oil comes from, you're going to find that it's a matter of choosing the devil with whom you want to dance. Also, as many people have repeatedly pointed out, BP doesn't even own most of the "BP" retail gas stations, and many of those stations don't even sell exclusively BP gasoline. So all you are doing is hurting independent small business people.  Finally, BP makes everything from airline fuel to plastics to solar panels. Are you going to boycott all of those products too?

You could do all of this, and maybe that's the message Banksy wants you to take away. But it would be a shame to see a great artist reduced to pandering to the worst instincts of the stunt-environmentalists and the anti-corporate left. 

Shall we play a game? What BP learned from Hollywood

Last weekend I was talking to a friend who had recently been to the Pentagon to talk to some honchos, and he said he'd even made it to the depths of the building where the real dark arts are practiced. He made the observation that it was pretty clear that a lot of the design of the place was most likely influenced by Hollywood -- that is, by their cinematically-constructed beliefs about what the Pentagon ought to look like. 

This is a widespread phenomenon, one that is most obviously at work in the tourist-trap area of most historical cities. We don't want to know what Rome is really like; we want to see a Rome that fits our sense of what it ought to be like, which is why there is a market for the faux-authentic in the first place. 

This is harmless enough in the case of mass tourism, but what about when a major corporation preys on our assumptions of authenticity to buff its much-tarnished image? That's the heart of the controversy over the faked images of BP's command centre. As Chris MacDonald points out, the images aren't misleading in any material way; rather, they seem designed to enhance the "authenticity" of the command centre, by making it look more like the one we all remember from movie's like War Games. 

Does it really matter? I agree with Chris, that this doesn't really affect the cleanup at all, nor does it really do much further damage to the company's reputation. But I'm tempted to go even further and (setting aside their despicable attempt at blaming the photographer) offer a half-hearted defence of the company, since you can sort of see their reasoning on this: As the spill has dragged on, it has become increasingly imperative for the company to be seen to be In Charge, to be Doing Something. And in the eyes of a public trained by years of Hollywood action films, the people In Charge and Doing Something are always in a room full of lots of screens showing video, graphs, charts, satellite images, and so on. You can imagine them saying to themselves, cripes, if we show our workers sitting in front of a bunch of blank screens, they'll think we don't have a handle on the spill. 

Yes, this is a weak defence, and it is in no way intended to let the company off the hook for any of its many transgressions against basic morality. But it does serve, I think, as an example of what happens in a culture where authenticity, as distinct from truth, is the cardinal virtue. 

INSTANT UPDATE: Seconds after I posted this, I came across this website, Hollywood Screens, devoted to cataloging all of the cool command screens in Hollywood movies. And lo, what is there at the very top? They've posted the pic of the BP command centre. 

Some useful links

1. The BBC can barely bring itself to concede that industrial agriculture is good for the planet.  

2. A good sentence from Ezra Klein:

"One of the really difficult things about getting people to eat better is convincing them that it's not just a way for others to impose class-based lifestyle preferences on one another." (via @EdwardBellamy)

3. @BPGlobalPR took his act live this week, and it didn't go over so well (via @Josh_Greenberg)"

Personally, I find his act far more powerful when it focuses on clever, pointed mockery of BP PR, so I asked for his thoughts on how this illusion of authenticity has helped create such a powerful message.

I even requested that he break character for a moment, to give an honest answer.

"Break character?" he scoffed. "Sir, give me your Twitter handle because you are at the top of my pickledick list!"

4. The Authenticity Hoax has been named-checked by New York celebrity chef Eddie Huang:

"I've been gettin crunk on the weekends with the goon squad, watching the NBA Finals, Boondocks, and reading this book 'The Authenticity Hoax' by: Andrew Potter."