Artist Lecture: The Yes Men 

To celebrate Tim Atseff’s exhibition Final Edition about the challenges faced by the newspaper industry, the Everson brings you a talk by infamous media provocateurs The Yes Men. The duo will highlight some of their projects involving print media, which includes distributing 100,000 copies of a fake edition of the New York Times declaring that the U.S. government had called an end to the Iraq war on July 4^th, 2009.

The Yes Men are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Over the past several decades, the duo has used the media to expose the corruption and hypocrisy of major corporations. The Yes Men have impersonated representatives from Halliburton, Dow Chemical, Exxon, and others, giving public presentations aimed at exposing what they believe to be discrepancies between how these groups want to be seen and how they really act. They call this process, “identity correction.”

The 2009 documentary The Yes Men Fix the World follows Bichlbaum and Bonanno as they expose people profiting from Hurricane Katrina, apologize on behalf of Dow Chemical for the massive chemical accident in Bhopal, India, and hand out 80,000 fake copies of the New York Times declaring that the Iraq War was over. Their follow-up documentary, 2015’s The Yes Men are Revolting focused on climate change denial. The Yes Men have also collaborated with other media pranksters, humorists, and activists, including Improv Everywhere, Andrew Boyd and Steve Lambert, and The Good Liars.