Reverend Billy

Reverend Billy is a persona created by the New York–based performance artist Bill Talen. Wearing a jacket and a fake clerical collar, Talen parodies the preaching practices of mass media evangelicals to critique issues of consumer culture, labor rights, and urban transformation under advanced capitalism.

Talen appropriates the costume and demeanor of the preacher to generate a theatrical tone for his rants about the effects of capitalism on people's daily lives. Usually accompanied by the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, Reverend Billy transforms performance venues into spaces of religious fervor, with a twist.

Besides performing on stage, Billy also performs, with collaborators and followers, in concrete commercial spaces such as the Disney Store and Starbucks, joined by collaborators and followers. Through different tactics, they indirectly address casual shoppers and employees, laying bare the stores' commercial strategies or denouncing its reliance on cheap, transnational labor. Reverend Billy orchestrates events that radically alter the preestablished protocol of proper mass consumption. These performances are both scripted and improvised in order to respond to the specificities of the place and to the actual responses of the people present. The scripts are available online in the Reverend Billy's webpage in the style of how-to manuals for activists. These actions include the following:

Reverend Billy's actions are structured around a belief in theatricality and parody as powerful tools to disrupt through scandal the smooth flow of transnational economies. In this sense, his tactics aim at unveiling the aspects of production and circulation, such as labor and market strategies, that are hidden to the consumers but affect their daily lives.