Can advertising critique itself?

So The Bay in downtown Vancouver has an interesting advertising campaign right now. At first I thought they just hadn’t noticed the implications of placing about 90 constantly running low-energy lightbulbs in a window display urging us to be “more green.”

When I mentioned it to Meghan, she pointed out that all of the window displays for that Bay location have the same sort of contradictory advertising. Like the “re-use your bag” window that’s advertising new purses. Something like conservation through consumption.

If the displays weren’t advertising, I’d take them as an artistic comment on the hypocrisy of large companies using “green” as advertising collateral. A tongue-in-cheek criticism of the corporate appropriation of environmentalist culture.

But it’s still coming from the Hudson’s Bay Company, and it’s still performing the primary role of advertising.

Is it possible for advertising to be an artistic comment on itself? A criticism of the role it is currently performing?

I like to imagine a subversive advertising exec sneaking this by the rest of the company… But it’s totally possible that they simply didn’t get the implications of what they were doing.

What do you think?