Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Normally, I'm a big fan of Banksy.  The art he makes is average at best, but his style is enthralling. He's mysterious. He's an outlaw of the art world, making a statement for the common man. He's sticking it to the snobbish art world where popularity and pomp can rule over the merit of art. By placing his own art in famous museums he asks what makes famous art famous.  It's a romantic notion that a graffiti artist has enough power to put his own work up next to the worshiped art in museums.

Banksy's  mock Coca-Cola Ad

But his jab at advertising in the recent mimicry of Coca-Cola misinterprets the goal of advertising and generalizes it the same way every hippy, beatnik, and hipster have for the past few generations.  Yes, we can all look at a brand like Coca-Cola and know that they've given us the run around. They are in control in the human-product relationship if only by sheer force and number of dollars. They dominate our soda intake, our football games, our olympics, and our movie previews. Coca-Cola is a company motivated by generating profit by gaining the majority of the market share for soda.  Coca-Cola is not the good guy. No matter how many non-profits they sponsor to tell us otherwise, they will never be the good guy. We know that. Banksy's use of the iconic bottle and the classic cursive font to get his message across generalizes all advertising to be like Coca-Cola's. He's making it one looming, scary, advertising industry operating on the sole basis of generating more profit.  Because when we look at a message like that, which is generalized into a villain, we can all agree with him and say, "Fuck the man. I'm a free thinker."

But Banksy is making the situation black and white (or rather red and white in this case), when in fact there is a lot more gray area than anything else.

First of all, people may not be in control of the messages posted around them, but they are in control of what they choose to believe.  Advertisers moved on from the idea that people were just sponges ready to be told what to buy in the 1960s.  They've realized that consumers are smart and they know what they want. They can only be swayed minimally by advertising and when they do so it's because something is appealing to them, not because they have no brains and no filters for information.  Banksy needs to give credit where credit is due: people are smart.  His quip, "They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate" assumes that women are always at pray to the images they see on TV; that they're moldable beings whose self image fluctuates based on the latest advert. Of course, some women are affected like this, but most are have a more stable self worth than Banksy is giving them credit for.

Secondly, advertising is not Coca-Cola. If we're going to villainize something lets make it the companies that bully their way into dominance, not the tool they use to do it.  Advertisers are not sitting in tall buildings laughing at you as Banksy says; they are thinking and worrying about your opinion all day, most everyday. Advertising can be powerful when done well, but this doesn't make it bad.  Separating atoms can create a bomb large enough to kill billions, or it can make enough energy to power their cities.
Advertising can and has been a tool of harm, but it has also been, and will continue to be, a tool for good.  At its very core advertising is an effective way to spread ideas.   Can we think about the advertising that happens for political campaigns? For non-profit organizations? For art? For music?  Lets not create and archetypal villain of advertising. Like everything else in the world, it's neither good nor bad, but somewhere in the middle.