Hijacking IKEA: Subverting Consumer Culture and the Family in Guy Ben-Ner’s Stealing Beauty

Stealing Beauty is a video performance by Guy Ben-Ner, where he films himself and his family surreptitiously in IKEA's Berlin, New York, and Netanya (Israel) showrooms. Stealing Beauty uses American family sitcom conventions to criticize global consumer culture and its related fantasies. Focusing on Stealing Beauty’s secret process of production I argue that it employs anarchist-like strategies that hijacked the space of consumer culture and evoked Guy Debord’s and Hakim Bey’s anti-consumerist writings. Although this work circulates in international fine arts arenas and self- references itself as an art commodity, Stealing Beauty’s use of hoax and critical engagements are further analysed as sharing elements with cultural-jamming practices by being subversive in public spaces and media arenas. Also addressed in this article are the gendered ramifications of Ben-Ner’s performance as an artist and as a father and how he employs his family as a subversive collectivity.