John Seabrook | Stories | The Big Sellout

The Big Sellout

Is creative independence a luxury we can no longer afford?

From The New Yorker
October 20, 1997

I--The New Suits

Back in the dawn of the age of content, six or seven years ago, the future of the content creator looked bright. The proliferation of channels for creativity, from up-band cable-TV stations to the Internet to CD-ROMs to zines, would give writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians new leverage in the struggle with their old adversaries the suits. In his 1990 book "Life After Television" the futurist George Gilder forecast a golden age of artistic expression, to be ushered in by the telecommunications explosion: "The medium will change from a mass-produced and mass-consumed commodity to an endless feast of niches and specialties.... A new age of individualism is coming, and it will bring an eruption of culture unprecedented in human history. Every film will be able to reach cheaply a potential audience of hundreds of millions."

But is the age of content a good time to be a content provider after all? Or is Gilder's scenario one of those gotchas that the future likes to pull on futurists? Yes, the old culture monopolies have toppled. As the channels of distribution have multiplied, what economists call "the barriers to entry" have fallen in the culture industry. Steven Bochco, the creator of "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue," thinks that the artist-suit balance of power in his business has definitely shifted toward the artist. "Twenty-five years ago the networks were incredibly powerful, because there were just three of them," he said recently. "Boy, you couldn't afford to run afoul of too many of these characters, or you'd be out of the business. There just weren't enough places to go. Today, there's always someone who's hurting badly enough to take more of a risk--Fox, Warner Brothers, UPN, HBO, Lifetime.... There are tremendous opportunities out there for a kind of creative adventurism."

Yes, technology has made publishing and recording much cheaper. Undiscovered pop stars no longer need labels to front them the money to make records. You can literally make a CD in your bedroom with a computer and software to create a soundscape, a remixer to clean up the sound, and a wax machine to press the disk. Danny Goldberg, the chairman of Mercury Records Group, told me, "Twenty years ago, Stevie Wonder, to make 'Songs in the Key of Life,' spent months in the studio getting all the sounds he wanted, and only Stevie Wonder could do that. Now anyone can. Ninety-nine per cent of the sounds you can imagine are available to you digitally. It used to be you'd say, 'Can I have a violin player?' and the label would say, 'No, you can't have a violin player--it's too expensive.' 'Can I do another vocal?' 'No, there's no time to do another vocal.' Those constraints don't exist anymore."

But, because more people can make content, more do. The market is flooded with content. There are too many film festivals, too many books, too many new bands, too many "new voices" and "stunning débuts." As a result, the old culture mediators, the people who owned the means of production, have been replaced by new mediators--the marketers, whose role is to make scrumptious little idea packages to wrap around the content ("It's Jonathan Swift on acid") and to tweak each package to make it fit a particular demographic niche. Where there once was a producer with a "golden gut," there is now a guy from market research--"some weird cross between a psychiatrist and a cheerleader," as the science-fiction writer William Gibson put it to me after seeing his film "Johnny Mnemonic" go through test-marketing--who gets up in front of a focus group and asks, "How did that character make you feel?"

It's not just in Hollywood that marketing and the bottom line are bullying the content providers. In the publishing world, editors act much more like marketers than they used to. Cathleen Black, the president of Hearst Magazines, said in a speech last spring, "Time was when it was enough for an editor to have a Rolodex full of writers' names . . . but today it's also necessary for them to steward their brands into other media, and outside the realm of media." And advertisers have become more a part of the editorial process than they used to be. I.B.M. recently pulled all its advertising--six million dollars a year--from Fortune and placed all its employees off limits to Fortune reporters, as a result of a piece that the company thought was unfavorable to Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., its C.E.O. Esquire's literary editor, Will Blythe, resigned when a David Leavitt short story involving homosexuality was pulled on the eve of its scheduled publication; the magazine's editors maintained that the story was pulled for "editorial reasons," but Blythe believed otherwise, having learned that the magazine was expected to notify Chrysler, an advertising client, of any "provocative" content that the conservative car manufacturer might not want appearing alongside its ads. He wrote in his resignation letter, "The balance is out of whack now. . . .We're taking marching orders (albeit, indirectly) from advertisers." Magazines are fighting the erosion of their editorial independence, but the age of content is working against them as well. There are too many magazines--hundreds of startups in 1997 alone--chasing too few ad dollars, and as a result advertisers can demand concessions that they never got before.

Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library, asked rhetorically if it would be possible for a single work of any kind to have the cultural impact today that Goethe's "Faust" had in Europe in the early nineteenth century. "If not, then what we've seen is a huge shift in the relationship between consumption and cultural output," he reflected. "In our day, with so much information coming through the line, and with the constant necessity to shift between the trivial and the important, it's hard to imagine a single text having that kind of impact. In the late twentieth century, we are a society that values output, speed, and productivity, whereas art requires time, reflection, tranquillity, and space--all commodities that are in limited supply these days."

In short, content creators have gained ample means to produce the product, but in the resulting cultural deluge they've lost the means of getting people to notice it. And while the marketers are always getting better--gathering more research, refining the demographic niches--the old methods of creative inspiration remain unimproved. The Information Highway is an immensely useful research tool: every home with a computer becomes a potential focus group. Market research seems to be creating a kind of neo-Darwinian sociology, a hybrid of science and business, that is on its way to replacing class, race, gender, and cultural identity with patterns of consumption behavior. If things keep going this way, there will soon be no difference between what the market wants to hear and what the individual is allowed to say. The only morality will be the morality of the demo, the first commandment of which is The market is always right.

II--The New Artists

For most of history, artists have worked for the suits, usually those worn by the Crown or the Church. Michelangelo did what the Pope told him to do. Mozart composed his music for the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Only since Byron has the artist as rock star, as pure individualist, been a popular icon. Oscar Wilde updated the Byronic ideal for the modernists, in his 1891 essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism": A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman. Out of this statement flows the concept of artistic integrity--of remaining true to your vision regardless of the market--and of "selling out," which is still very much with us. In the technical arts, the notion that the best inventions come from independent inventors has been exploded in the twentieth century, but the romantic doctrine of individualism is still the rule in the culture industry. Individuals are supposed to be better at creating "heart" and "vision" than groups are; groups take on the values of the group, which are less pure. As the saying in show business goes, "A building can't make a movie." But in fact buildings help make movies all the time. Penny Marshall was insistent on casting Robert De Niro in the lead role of "Big," even though marketing said they couldn't sell that; in the end Tom Hanks got the part and was brilliant. Executives at Paramount worried that the prolonged kiss between Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck in "In & Out" would turn off some viewers, but when preview audiences howled with delight at the kiss, the scene stayed. In the new James L. Brooks movie, "As Good As It Gets," scheduled for release at Christmas and now in previews, test audiences actually insisted on a non-formulaic, non-Hollywood ending, which gave Brooks himself more power to do something unconventional.

Sometimes limits imposed by the suits can sharpen and focus an artist's vision: it has been said that Richard Avedon's fashion photographs, done under contract and in a climate of commercial pressure, are as good as his "art" pictures of the West. Or take Ani DiFranco, a twenty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter with a devoted cult following, who has put out nine albums in seven years, all on her own label, Righteous Babe Records. For DiFranco, independence has been artistically and commercially rewarding: she gets four dollars and twenty-five cents per record, as opposed to the two dollars that a major label pays its artists. But for the consumer is it such a good deal? You go to the record store to get an Ani DiFranco record, and there are nine of them! Which one should you choose? A major label would have forced her to limit her output to one album every two years, in order not to flood her own market. You have to spend twice as much money, and devote twice as much time plowing through the less than great stuff, to hear her best songs.

Thomas Schatz, the author of "The Genius of the System," a study of the Hollywood studio system, argues that movies made in the thirties and forties, when the artists were controlled by the suits, were just as good as the movies made in the later auteur period. "The quality and artistry of all these films were the product not simply of individual human expression, but of a melding of institutional forces," he writes. "In each case the 'style' of a writer, director, star--or even a cinematographer, art director, or costume designer--fused with the studio's production operations and management structure, its resources and talent pool, its narrative traditions and market strategy." Schatz says of Hitchcock, who was the model for later auteurs, "[When] Hitchcock could write his own ticket in an industry that seemed to be patterning itself after his career, both the quality and the quantity of Hitchcock's work fell sharply." Many have said that George Lucas made his best movies, "American Graffiti" and "Star Wars," while he was under the control of the hated studios.

Some would argue that the culture industry as a whole is entering a period like the days of the studio system--a period when art and commerce will be more rationally integrated, and the church-state divide between the artist and the suit will gradually become obsolete. The rise of modern marketing seems to be dismantling that old dualism. Though marketing emerged out of the black lagoon of advertising--it was always about selling content--as time goes on it has an ever greater role in the creation of content. In an increasingly cluttered marketplace, the content, which the creator supplies, and the idea about the content, which the marketer confects, become harder to distinguish from each other.

At the same time, technology is changing traditional notions of authorship. The ability we have to rapidly access many different ideas on a subject with ever more refined searches increases the chance that an author is using someone else's ideas, or rather blending original and borrowed thoughts. On the Web, where hypertext links to many other authors may be embedded in a single text, the decline of the physical separateness of texts is challenging traditional notions of authorship. In the music world, "sampling," the mingling of one person's sounds with appropriated or "quoted" bits of other people's music, has become as legitimate a way of composing pop tunes as the old method of making them up yourself. James Schamus, a screenwriter and independent-film producer, thinks that what's happening is not so much the rise of corporate control over artistic freedom but a rethinking of who the artist is. There seems to be a new kind of creator emerging, whose job is to execute the wishes of the marketers and the executives in a creative way--to synthesize various ribbons of creative input--rather than to be a solitary auteur. "Notions of authorship have been blown wide open," Schamus says. "The author is really the person who owns the activity, who is paying the artists for their time while they are doing that work--that's the author."

III--The Two Grids

George W. S. Trow, who saw the future so long before it happened that he wrote about it in the past tense, perceived the fate of artistic independence in his "Within the Context of No Context," published in this magazine in 1980. According to Trow, there are two grids of pop culture: the big grid, the America of two hundred and sixty million, and the small grid, the grid of you and your intimate feelings. The age of content has progressed along Trovian lines. The big grid has become far more massive, while the intimate grid has grown smaller, tighter, augering in on itself. Occasionally, the grid of two hundred and sixty million and the grid of one lurch into alignment. The death of a princess or the terrible last hours of an Everest victim suddenly makes intimacy and massiveness feel like the same thing.

On the big grid are the stadium concerts, the latest Tom Clancy novel, the huge Broadway spectacular, and the "event movies." One of the basic truths of the big grid is that a culture project that relies on artistic execution is riskier than a market-tested project that will make money even if it's bad, because it's aimed at the all-important under-twenty-five-year-old-male demographic quadrant and because Stallone is huge in India. The content of the big-grid events is as shape-changeable as the cyborg in "Terminator 2," and it keeps coming back, in the form of books, videos, computer games, merchandise, and Happy Meals, so that even if, say, a movie bombs at the box office the studio has a shot at making money. And the global marketplace is so new, so vast, the money involved in these ventures so big, that no one--not even people who work at the studios--really knows if these movies are making money or not. Profits are less important than the attention the events generate in the culture; the perception of profitability is the main thing. Here, too, marketing is all.

The big grid has been a disaster for the arts: the homogenization that plagued mass culture is worse than ever now that culture is global. In the case of the worst movies, in fact--the blockbuster sequels to blockbusters that have reached their endlife as content--the American public can smell death and stays away. Kids seem to have an especially acute nose for carrion. "How do they know?" Tom Sherak, a longtime executive at Twentieth Century Fox, asked me recently. "How do they know they want to see 'The Fifth Element' and they don't want to see 'Fathers' Day'? They know something we don't know. All our research, and we don't know. We think it's the look. They perceive 'Fifth Element' to be about something that's hip, fresh, and different, while 'Fathers' Day' looks old and tired."

The intimate grid, lying at the opposite end of the mediascape, is the repository of all that's hip and different. It's the world of the Off-Off-Broadway one-act, the cutting-edge zine, the genre-busting band, and the "tweener"--the small film that falls between genres and cuts across demographic quadrants (male, female, under twenty-five, over twenty-five). The intimate grid is Jarvis Cocker, of the glamrock Brit band Pulp, in song No. 4 on the CD "Different Class," telling the big grid to "take your year in Provence and shove it up your ass." The more alienated people feel by the merchandising-driven, corporately compromised state of the big grid, the more comfort they take in the small one, where the artists are "independent" and the art is "real." On the small grid, the message "It's cool to be different" has replaced the big-grid message "It's cool to be the same."

An optimistic view of the media-scape is that the small grid acts as a dialectical force on the big grid and, over time, improves the general level of culture. Because the public now has a choice, the good art will triumph, the bad art will be driven out, and the market will be right in the moral sense as well as the economic. This is the view currently held by the filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan. "What we saw this summer," he explained, "was certain executives' misunderstanding the lessons of their elders, who always, finally, trusted the filmmakers in the end, because they knew suits could not create an actual movie. The younger guys came in and thought, Oh well, we're supposed to be the boss of all bosses, we'll make this movie. So we saw some actual movies made by executives, and they were utterly soulless and chaotic, without any connection to storytelling or any of the values people used to go to movies for--they were suit movies. But the wheel always turns. Things will always come around. There will always be this enormous need for the fresh idea. That's what all success and money is generated from."

The small grid is a lot better than it was ten years ago. Look at all the styles of hip-hop music available from D.J. Lenny M., who sells his tapes on the corner of St. Marks Place and Third Avenue: everything from trance to jungle to underground house to smooth reggae. The moviegoer who likes "art house" films no longer has to go to art houses (which by and large don't exist anymore) to see them. "Sling Blade" and "Shine" and "Cinema Paradiso" play next to "Air Force One" at the multiplex. Independent films received four of the five Oscar nominations for best picture last year. But in the process the word "independent" has undergone an Orwellian inversion and now means almost the opposite of what it used to mean. Words like "independent," "alternative," and "extreme" have become slick and empty containers into which marketers can pack tons of content. That's why Geffen, Time Warner, and Microsoft were so eager to buy into Sub Pop Records, the Seattle-based indie label (Time Warner won), and why big beer brands have started adorably homey microbreweries (which in turn have inspired Miller Genuine Draft's recent ad campaign, "It's Time for a Good Old Macrobrew"), and why all the major studios have acquired stakes in "independents" like Miramax and Fine Line and October Films. Now the eighties' corporate raider Carl Icahn is getting into the independent-film business, too. "'Independent film' was an oxymoron to begin with, and is probably a misnomer to finish with," James Schamus says. "Who cares if you're independent? You want to be independent, sharpen your pencil and write a poem. You want to spend twenty million--well, you know, get real."

As true independence becomes a nostalgic memory, the idea of independence becomes more marketable still. Nicholas Barker, a young British filmmaker who took his first film to Telluride this year, says, "A festival like Sundance has become an institution in which the studios use a dubious title like 'independent' to confer sexy status on films which are in fact not independent at all. I met a whole load of guys who were simply donning the independent cap because it was the fastest route to Hollywood." (When I said, "O.K., thanks, I won't quote you," Barker said, "Oh, by all means, quote me.") Oliver Stone told me, "Real independence is independent thinking, and we don't see much of that. Yeah, these films are raw, and sometimes they're not finished. The thought process isn't completed. They can often be an interesting little slice oflife, but whether they can have any interest to anyone outside a sectarian portion of the population is debatable. And look at the second pictures--too many people are selling out the moment they have success."

The second-picture virus has attacked all the art forms. Many artists who are great as small independents can't survive the leap to the big grid, but because the big-grid marketers are always on the lookout for independent talent they can introduce, the young talents get pushed along too fast. "We're in a period where the new artist is expected to be the new messiah," says George C. Wolfe, the producer of New York's Public Theatre. "The whole concept of the journeyman artist has disappeared. You are not allowed to go on a journey. There is no journey. You're either extraordinarily brilliant or you're dead." Lindsay Law, the president of Fox Searchlight, recalls a small-grid project he snapped up: "The provocative new film by nineteen-year-old Matty Rich. That was the selling point. He was nineteen. And he was this young black kid--I was like the third or fourth white person he had ever met. He finally got a second movie, and it was dreadful."

This strip-mining of talent is producing an age of one-hit wonders, an age more favorable to art than to artists; but the system is addicted to the hype generated by the changes in scale. Instead of the small grid exerting salutary force on the big grid, the big grid is sucking the life out of the small. In the theatre world, Wolfe says, "a corporate thought process is beginning to dictate what has always been a small, individual- or community-driven art form." The reason, he explained, is that in response to rising costs Broadway producers have made alliances with corporations, and this has brought about a relentlessly box-office-driven approach to Broadway theatre. "As the commercial landscape gets more and more bland in an attempt to appeal to everyone," he said, "the pressure's put on the not-for-profits to be what Broadway used to be once upon a time--to provide exciting and challenging theatre for the commercial landscape. As opposed to being what the not-for-profit originally was, which was a breeding ground for maturing talent, and an alternative to the commercial landscape. We're instead expected to pick up the slack. So in the nonprofit world you have to be smarter about every single thing that you do. There are plays that I did two or three years ago at the Public which I would be very cautious about doing now, because I now understand that I'm not just letting a new artist be discovered, I'm introducing a new 'product,' which is a daunting task."

The midspace between the grids has become an apocalyptic heath, which the mid-list authors, the good but not brilliant filmmakers, and the solid but not spectacular bands, who once were the de-facto standard-bearers of the culture, haunt like ghosts. It's like Las Vegas at night: a tantalizing, amoral world, lit by the sparks of artists, actors, musicians, and writers who are in transit between success and failure--the prodigies arcing upward from the small grid and feeling that wallop as their identities are zapped by money and fame; the thirty-year-old instant has-beens spinning back into the small grid, spent and forgotten. There's Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the talented co-director of "Delicatessen," who has just finished making "Alien Resurrection" for Twentieth Century Fox. There's James Mangold, whose first film was the low-budget "Heavy," and whose second film was "Cop Land." Have a most excellent adventure, dudes! There's Fiona Apple, the fresh-faced, too skinny new pop star, whose video for "Criminal" borrows from heroin chic. There's Charles Frazier, the author of "Cold Mountain," one of the best-selling first novels in history; he recently sold it to U.A./M.G.M. for one and a quarter million dollars, to be directed by Anthony Minghella of "The English Patient." Hey, Charles, are you still the same old guy you used to be? Do you still clean the bugs off the windshield of that junky old ride?

IV--The Marketer Within

The proliferation of new media may or may not bring more artistic freedom to the next generation of content creators, but it seems certain to inculcate in them a better sense of the awesome reality of the market. There is no sign that advertising, the traditional source of support for popular art, on which our church-state system of art and commerce has been erected, will work on the Web, where the audience has the technological advantage of being able to choose what it wants to see. The music video, a seamless synthesis of content and advertising, is a model for the content creators of the future. Some of the most original morsels on network television these days are the brief avant-garde stories that form the "content" of the Levi's ads, or the Nike series featuring the picaresque adventures of Li'l Penny.

The writer and director Michael Tolkin told me a story about a lecture he gave recently to aspiring filmmakers. He mentioned Jimmy Cagney, and was shocked to discover that virtually none of them knew who Cagney was. "People in their twenties have for the most part no memory of history or art or anything else that's older than fifteen years," he said. "This generation, which grew up on cable TV, and on more recent movies, has been spoon-fed culture that was much more market-oriented than the culture of an earlier generation. Today the marketer is within." In other words, the artists of the next generation will make their art with an internal marketing barometer already in place. The auteur as marketer, the artist in a suit of his own: the ultimate in vertical integration.

So what's the future of selling out? Of what value are artistic principles in an age when the moral logic of remaining true to your vision or your heart has been overrun by the economic logic of the market? The starving artist, the visionary who can't make money from his art, has lost his resonance as a cultural archetype. He has been replaced by the charismatic grifter--the nineteen-year-old kid who makes a movie on his parents' credit card. He won't starve if the movie flops. He'll roll his debt over onto a new credit card that offers a six-month, six-per-cent grace period and try again.

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