The Rebel Sells out, or, when Banksy did the Simpsons

The above cartoon, courtesy of the late and lamented Spy magazine, captures pretty much everything that needs to be said about the relationship between art and money. For those who need it spelled out: there is a very lucrative market for art that takes a swing at capitalism. As Thomas Frank famously put it: Capitalism has amassed great sums by charging admission to the ritualized simulation of its own lynching.

 

There are two ways of interpreting this. One is to fret that this is just evidence of the ability of capitalism to co-opt and commodify all forms of dissent. That’s the line taken over the years by Adbusters magazine, Naomi Klein, and even Frank himself, in his weaker moments. There’s another way of reading this, though, which is to recognize that capitalism does not co-opt various forms of non-conformist artistic dissent, because there is nothing to co-opt in the first place. Dissent doesn’t threaten capitalism, because capitalism does not require the sort of conformity that the dissent purports to subvert. That, anyway, is the argument that Joe Heath and I advance in our 2004 book, The Rebel Sell.

Despite close to half a century of futile attempts at jamming the system, many artists continue to take their kicks at the can. One of the more recent is the now-famous intro to the Simpsons that was done by the British street artist, Banksy. For those who missed it, the notorious couch gag at the end of the intro pans out to show the episode being produced in the cartoon-world equivalent of Mordor, a sweatshop where kids and unicorns toil and are sacrificed in the name of capitalism. 

As my colleague at Maclean’s magazine, Jaime Weinman, has pointed out, there are two problems with this. The first is that it is old: they did this gag in their fourth season, i.e. almost twenty years ago. Second, it has no bearing on reality. Yes, the Simpsons is produced in Korea, that’s no secret. But apparently when the original asian-sweatshop gag was done, the cartoonists almost refused to do the work, on the grounds that it did not reflect their working conditions. 

That didn’t stop Naomi Klein from posting the following to her Twitter account last week:

@NaomiAKlein

YES, I've seen Banksy's Simpsons thing. It's brilliant. Still, can't help but despair at capitalism's ability to absorb all critiques

Yes, if by “brilliant” you mean “not true” and “not new”. As for “capitalism’s ability to absorb all critiques”, I remain surprised at Klein’s reluctance to celebrate the manner in which capitalism does so. After all, more often than not, capitalists absorb legitimate critiques in ways that actually make the world a better place. As I argue in this essay looking at No Logo ten years on, the mainstreaming of old critiques is a success story:

From eco- to organic, fair trade to locally sourced, sweatshop safe to dolphin friendly, sales pitches that 10 years ago would have reeked of patchouli oil and set the red baiters on full alert are now thoroughly mainstream. Companies like Whole Foods (and its quarterly “5 Percent Day,” when each location donates 5 percent of its net sales to a nonprofit) or the Vermont-based Seventh Generation (a natural soap and detergent company devoted to all forms of sustainability, whose co-founder and executive chairman is known as the “inspired protagonist” of the firm) are massively successful operations.

This is only a bad thing if you think that the point of dissent is not to change the system for the better, but to bring it down entirely. And while Klein is welcome to that pipe dream, it is disheartening to see an artist like Banksy falling for the same nonsense. 

I’m a big fan of Banksy's work, and I thought his recent film was a minor work of genius. Yes, his work is “anti-authoritarian”, but only, for the most part, in the most juvenile sense. As I read him, his work is essentially playful and ironic, devoted to the proposition that whatever else it may be, street art is ultimately about just playing around with images, ideas, and the urban environment. But lately he seems to have decided that it is not enough to be a genius aesthete, he needs to be taken seriously as a pundit as well. This past summer, he produced a couple of “environmental” installations, including one 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 now with this Simpsons gag,  he’s jumped into the world of culture-jamming circa 1996. Perhaps he means it all to be oh so meta, pointing out the absurdity of artists taking money while criticising the people who are giving them money. In which case, I point you to the cartoon at the top of this blog entry. And if he means it seriously, then so much the worse, to see a genius of the absurd selling out his principles to the politics of the ridiculous, in search of some vacuous left-wing cred that he neither needs nor deserves.