While the City Renewal exhibit gains added meaning from the fact that the warehouse it’s in is in the process of being up-converted into condos, some would argue it also loses meaning by getting its funding from Red Bull.
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Does big-biz backing dilute the impact of guerrilla messaging? Critics of the corporatization of urban life are pretty sure it does.
“This attack on capitalism is brought to you by Red Bull,” jokes American political theorist Benjamin Barber on the telephone from New York.
His book, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, And Swallow Citizens Whole, discusses the issue of counterculture co-optation.
“Red Bull wants to use edgy anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment ways, but it does that precisely to further the aims of an establishmentarian commercial society,” says Barber.
But guerrilla artist Dan Bergeron says he’s not much impressed by the anti-corporate dissing. “Obviously, a project of this nature is time-consuming and needs resources and money to produce,” he says. “Red Bull 381 thought it was a great initiative, and even though it couldn’t happen in their gallery space, they helped fund it.”
Large-scale projects just aren’t possible, he says, unless a big company fronts the cash, noting that the Regent Park Luminato installation was made with the help of L’Oréal.
“It’s definitely not a necessary evil. It basically tells me that guerrilla [artists] have lost their plot, lost their soul,” says Kalle Lasn, founder of culture jamming magazine Adbusters, which itself is criticized for marketing a brand of anti-capitalism sneakers.
He adds that these artists “are no longer in the business of creating new meaning, just enhancing their own brand.”
Bergeron disagrees.
“We need to realize that people need jobs to support themselves. We shouldn’t just look to the government for artist handouts.”
Barber isn’t convinced. “Everybody has a right to figure out how to make a living in our society, but if you want to oppose it, undermine it, subvert it, you should take particular care in the degree you allow yourself to be used or get into adapting the forms of the enemy you think you’re opposing,” he says.
Andrew Potter, co-author of The Rebel Sell, says it’s interesting that the target audience of Red Bull is so similar to the stratum of people now concerned about gentrification.
“The exhibit highlights the absolute concordance of interests between artists and this form of consumerism. The people going to this installation are the kind of people who drink Red Bull,” he says. “The people worrying about gentrification aren’t the people who left – they’re the people who came in and worry about their status.
“I’ve found it charming,” Potter says, “that culture jammers have abandoned the idea that what they’re doing is taking down the system. They just want to kick the can and have pillow fights.”
Or, in this case, make cool-looking recreations of old buildings and sip energy drinks.
