Objectify This

We’ve long celebrated reinventions of billboards that advocate everything from pinching bottoms to sexual entitlement, so initially ObjectifyThis was thrilled to learn about the Be Yourself Movement.

Flavorwire describes the Be Yourself Movement as “an Italian art collective with an agenda,” by which mean a political movement. BYM, as they call themselves, is a group of youngish people who reorganize billboards to say things like “Be stupid as these ads.” Their logo, the letters BYM with a slingshot for the ‘Y’, seems to reject the monotony of both advertising and the consumerism and conformity it inspires. You can check out a video of their antics after the jump.

Flavorwire tiptoes around the politics involved, calling their article “Be Yourself Movement: Corporate Collaborations or Pure Vandalism?” But unless the defacement and public derision of these companies and their property  is considered collaboration, there’s little chance of that.

The Be Yourself Movement is a wonderful idea, but it has since taken a strange turn. At the risk of publicly inciting vandalism, I’ll publicly incite this kind of vandalism, this kind of diy, up-the-punks political aesthetic. In general, I support the expression of individual opinions in cultural commons and public space as much as the next member of the Church of Just Stop Shopping, but the Be Yourself Movement is a special case.

I initially support billboard amendments and the like that because they inject agency into a culture saturated with encouragement to buy, buy, buy your way to a better life. In the U.S., there’s little attention to the interior — and even then, you’re expected to pay for lessons in thinking your way to happiness at the School of Practical Philosophy or for therapy or for motivational speakers; you’re supposed to buy the book that Oprah endorses or that Amazon or Cosmopolitan recommends. But reading women’s magazines for just 1-3 minutes has been shown to lower women’s self-esteem. This culture of self-help undermines us by telling us, over and over, that we’re not good enough until we pay them, that being ourselves and doing our thing is inferior to some good or service they’re offering.

Even the Be Yourself movement, which conjures images out of movies like Gilliam’s Brazil or Jeneut and Caro’s Delicatessen, in which the political resistance literally lives underground in strange masks, like scuba divers, is not new. Here’s footage of them in the subway in Milan:

What makes the BYM so strange, however, is that they are not just this group; they have been co-opted by the same international corporate interests that they purport to undermine. Their website is currently a collaboration with EmilytheStrange, an alterna-HelloKitty for the Goth and disaffected markets, which is available for sale wherever kids are seeking something that’s not quite identified with mainstream corporate culture — these days, I’d guess that that means Hot Topic.

In an additional twist, even EmilytheStrange isn’t being herself– in 2009, her owners, the skater brand Cosmic Debris, settled out of court with the authors of a children’s book from 1978 called Nate the Great and the Lost List, which featured a physically identical character named Rosamond who, according to the text, “did not look hungry or sleepy. She looked the way she always looks. Strange.” Meanwhile, when Emily  debuted in 1991, her tagline was “Emily didn’t look tired or happy. She looked the way she always looks. Strange.”

While the tone of the artists’ statement after the settlement makes it sound like they got their due, there’s something unsettling about the idea that even a movement focused on undermining corporate culture would allow itself to be bought. Maybe they were getting older, and needed to settle down, or maybe they believe that they’ve conned corporations into promoting vandalism — the website itself is an image of a town, which you can adjust with your own messages. But there is no triumph in virtual vandalism; there is no audience to have their horizons broadened, and without a body politic, it ceases to be a political act.