Selling out: still wack!

A quick little piece on artistic integrity

I promised myself I’d take this month off, but then I saw the following post gain a bit of traction:

THE MORAL CASE FOR “SELLING OUT”

I made a quick jab at the piece on Substack Notes, and its author, Franklin Leonard, got a little (understandably) incensed. I did, after all, call his piece “repulsive.” Eventually Leonard said…

…which is fair, because my written criticism was largely cursory up to that point. But I do think Leonard’s piece displays an opinion I see gaining leverage in some spheres (and am extremely against) and thus does indeed deserve more thorough engagement. Still, I’m going to try and make this quick and sloppy, because I am, after all, “on vacation.” Let’s go.

The Moral Case for Selling Your Soul

Now, I want to begin by saying that I think Leonard is a smart guy (I know a lot of my followers who get thirsty for blood in my more brutal critiques are gonna be pretty disappointed to hear me say that), and I think the foundations of his argument come from a pretty understandable concern, namely the sort of inflation we have increasingly seen in the Attention Economy. There is more work out there than ever—around 50,000 English-language novels were published in the 19th century, whereas over 100,000 English-language novels are now published per year—and yet the share of attention art commands hasn’t been this low in a very long time, as the terrible shadow of social media swallows up more and more of the public’s increasingly atrophying amount of free time under the conditions of advancing capitalism. To quote Leonard: “They have jobs. Children. Bills. Depression. Phones. They are exhausted.” Leonard also correctly assesses that “serious” art production today takes precious little of this into account. Much of “serious” art production today essentially operates within an old world paradigm that comes form a context of an enlarged petite bourgeois class ready to consume a controlled stream of content to fill their plentiful bored hours. Those people increasingly do not exist.

In their absence and the face of the content glut, parsing signal from noise becomes nearly impossible for most, and so the industry prizes in particular those who seem like their signal can be boosted enough to cut through all that noise, however briefly, and find itself falling within the malnourished diet of the new media consumer (apologies for the mixed metaphor, but I’m ON VACATION so I’m not fixing it). Leonard is especially persuasive when speaking to aspiring screenwriters in this context who want jobs. In that respect, his advice seems pragmatic. Write something instantly legible. Prove you can hold attention. Buy yourself leverage. Fine. Ultimately this sounds a little too much like the old “one for them / one for me” logic of screenwriting (years ago I saw an interview in the movie Bad Writing with a very depressed Daniel Waters, screenwriter of Heathers, who talked about how following that path led him to effectively “one for nobody”), but sure. However, he generalizes this career strategy into a universal artistic ethic, as he doesn’t just pose the moral case for selling out, he also poses the immoral case for not selling out. To not sell out, in Leonard’s mind, is to deny care to an audience, because, in spite of railing against people like me who might reduce “commercial” down to its least sympathetic qualities, he effectively reduces “non-commercial” down to its. “Non-commercial” becomes, as Leonard frames it, either not caring about your audience or else actively seeing them as your enemy.

So let me tackle a number of the assumptions here in quick succession.

ASSUMPTION #1: Part of the point of being an artist is to get a job.

Much of Leonard’s position imagines that the whole point here is to get your foot in the door and be able to make a living as a working artist. A little while ago I posted a Note that addresses this directly:

I don’t think wanting to “write literature as a job” is a good way to make much writing worth reading. This professionalized way of looking at literature as a career path is no good. I often get told I’m being “classist” or “elitist” by saying this but like… get a real job. Culture is our shared progeny, and if you’re just going to put out marketable slop to fill the publishing glut then I suggest you instead do something of use to us all like become a garbage man. At least that way you’re putting trash away rather than littering it in bookstores.

Write work that needs to exist and if you happen to be able to make money doing it then good for you, but I know all too many people who sold their soul for a ride with a big publisher, took all the compromises and the edits and the sensitivity readers and the media training, and you just look at what they put out and think “you know we’ve got a shortage of doctors in this country, right?”

Of course, I was talking about literature, and Leonard could fairly argue that, even if you take the above as a reasonable position, films are a lot more expensive to make, even on an “indie” scale. You need to make money to make films, because films require a lot of money to make. But I saw Lav Diaz’s Magellan last night and got to see the man speak about it personally, and he talked about the hundreds of thousands he pocketed in grants to make one of the most compelling new films I’ve seen in years. If you must make films then there are still avenues you can pursue to get them done. Much of the infrastructure for this kind of work has been eroded, but there are still ways.

I’m from Canada, home of the NFB, which was once a world-class publicly-funded body that put out phenomenal, boundary-pushing films—up until they were chopped up by 80s neoliberalism.¹ Nowadays it mostly puts out pretty vacuous idpol-type filler that seems like it mostly exists because they had to make “something” with their paltry funding. The vision is dead. I don’t think there’s any consideration for whether anyone would actually want to watch any of this shit—not because they’re being “non-commercial” but because they just don’t have the resources or will to make anything else under these conditions. Which brings me to:

ASSUMPTION #2: “Non-commercial” means “audience be damned” and “commercial” means “pro-audience.”

At one point in his pep talk, Leonard says: “The audience is not your enemy. The audience is the point.”² Outside either the most personality-disorder-riddled artists or the ones hamming it up for shits (like me, for instance), I do not think “the audience is my enemy” is a seriously held belief to many real artists, at least not to the point where these artists actively do not want an audience to “like” their work. Disregarding normative tastes or standards or expectations is not the same thing as disregarding an audience—refusing to “play to the gallery” does not mean you do not care about the people in the gallery, it means you are not allowing their expectations and explicit desires to hem in what you give them. One still hopes that your work will move an audience in spite of this, at least some of them—because an audience is not a single, unified entity with a single set of desires, and when we treat it like one we reduce it to its lowest common denominators, and we do our audiences a disservice.

Throughout his piece, Leonard frames providing work that can easily grip the attention of the largest possible audience as an “act of care”:

Earnest as it may be, I still believe that a popular movie, done right, is a small act of care at a global scale. Look around. The world out there is rough right now for almost everyone.

There are plenty of artists who care deeply about audiences while rejecting the demand for instant legibility. There are artists who imagine their audience as something to be formed, not catered to, though yes, the increasing distractability of our audiences, fostered by the world in which we live, may make the share of those willing to lend you that patience small. If Leonard wanted to couch his argument entirely in the economic argument on those grounds—that that audience may be too small to generate appropriate revenue—then fine, but the moral argument that frames this as indulgent is bogus and in actuality inhumane. It is an act of care to ask more of an audience, to expect better of them. It is an act of care to try to challenge an audience. It is an act of care to trust that people are more than their degraded habits under the influence of platform capitalism. This is not “disdain,” but concerns a completely different idea of what “care” for an audience looks like—I do not think it is an act of care to feed an addict’s fix with no intention of alleviating it. What it is is enabling. Even worse so when you’re actively collaborating with their dealer.

Yes, it is not necessarily the case that everything with commercial appeal is necessarily empty—sometimes art and commercial appeal can, indeed, align—but assuming that “commercial” work is simply what people genuinely and authentically “want” is an assumption that both belittles the public and ignores the material conditions of these consumption habits. In most cases, it is in fact commercial work which has the most contempt for its audience. I’ve written about this at length before:

The real moral question isn’t whether your door is wide, it’s who built the hallway, it’s who controls the crowd, it’s what kinds of rooms are being quietly demolished outside those walls.

Leonard says:

Somehow, “commercial” became an insult associated with some sort of moral failure when all it really means is what most of us want for our art more than anything: People actually watching

…but that’s not what “commercial” “really means.” What “commercial” “really means” is predicated on a certain kind of relationship between art and capital. “Commercial” space is dominated by the whims of very large corporations who one has to cater to. It is a material relationship, not just some immaterial point of pride. Which is where we get to the meat of why it is I find Leonard’s conclusions not merely disagreeable, but in fact “repulsive.”

ASSUMPTION #3: Attention Economy Neoliberalism—There Is No Alternative.

A major problem with Leonard’s thinking is that he is considering explicitly pro-market solutions—to produce commercially-viable work which succeeds within the market—to deal with the problem of the depressed, phone-addicted, exhausted viewer with a short attention span and very little free time—a market problem. This hypothetical viewer is not a neutral occurrence, he is an explicit product of the economy Leonard wants us to cater to. He is depressed and phone-addicted and exhausted and has a short attention span and very little free time because the apartment he rents is an asset in some asshole’s investment portfolio and so he’s gotta work a second job at a place with no union and no benefits and so he’s so tired that when he gets home all he can do is sit down and develop his addiction to a platform that has turned his very attention into an asset too and it’s turning his brain to goo. Leonard’s position implies that we must grab his attention with the tenacity of those same pocket Skinner boxes, that art must in some way mimic this form of engagement by becoming friction-less enough to compete on the attention market with social media.We can call the act of taking this position to these kinds of extremity “attention neoliberalism,” the resignation to market solutions within the attention economy as being the means of fixing artistic problems.

The conditions produced by market logics are taken for granted and the ethical demand placed on artists is to optimize themselves to those conditions or else they are the immoral ones. Your audience has been ground down by the economy, and so the artist must take it upon themselves to grind themselves and their work down to “meet them where they are”—it just so happens that, in the process, you gratify the ones grinding down your audience by lining their pockets. Not wanting to play a part in this process, not wanting to be the designated pharmakon of the capitalist class to kill the pain of its victim before one more day of the victim’s suffering, while also making as much money for the victimizer as you can in the process, is not a statement of indifference toward “real people.” Yes, some work is, as we have said, both artistically and commercially fulfilling, but this is the rare exception and not the rule, especially under the advancing conditions we find ourselves in—late capitalism, financialized attention, media monopolies, etc.

Leonard knows things are bad—“Look around. The world out there is rough right now for almost everyone”—but he just can’t help but validate the process through which it can only get worse. Strangely, he seems to believe that part of the moral imperative for making commercially-viable films is that we have to save the studio system:

Like it or not, the most reliable way for the film industry to make money at the scale necessary to justify its infrastructure, marketing, and corporate debt is still the big, globally legible movie with a low entrance and a wide door[…]

Without a steady supply of scripts to make into those movies, the business will make less money. When the money shrinks, the industry’s appetite for risk shrinks. And when the industry gets (even) less brave, it’ll get even more reliant on recycling whatever brands it can still reboot one last time. And as a result, we’ll lose one of the few remaining shared spaces we all still walk into together in the 21st century.

The film industry doesn’t just want commercial spec scripts right now. It needs them, desperately.

It’s existential, whether anyone wants to admit it on the record or not.

Now, firstly, this isn’t historically true—the era of “New Hollywood” actually emerged from the studios making less money and being desperate, it actually widened the range of what Hollywood was willing to accept. New Hollywood then died specifically because the studios started making a lot of money again—the rise of the modern blockbuster with movies like Jaws and Star Wars led to a narrowing of opportunity, not a widening of it.

Secondly, fuck the studios. I hope they all collapse. If you think you need big capitalist studios to make movies, you can talk to Tarkovsky. The profiteers don’t care about art, we need to instead build infrastructure for creating work outside of that system—we need to re-fund the apparatuses of public funding for the arts, including film.

Leonard poses that sometimes you need to sell out in order to succeed, as if he doesn’t realize that that is literally the problem, that that is itself already the definition of selling out—he’s just saying “sometimes you have to sell out to sell out!” This is reinforced by assuming a natural stupidity to audiences, and an assumption that anything other than friction-free entertainment is a denial of care or concern for your audience. I have rebutted this at length, but here is my conclusion. Here’s the moral case for selling out: it’s immoral. Plain and simple. Live by your principles and, if you have to, die by them.

Leonard frames the situation as a neutral environmental constraint (or at least one we cannot meaningfully challenge)—the weather we must dress for—actively shaping how art circulates and by extension what kind of art can survive at all, but there are alternatives and we must fight for them.³

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Okay anyways I gotta get going, I’m ON VACATION—sorry everyone if that was all rather messy and rambly (even moreso than normal), but I don’t want to edit it and I’m not gonna make Sire edit it either because he is also ON VACATION as mandated by me. Okay bye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. Some regular readers will think it odd that I’m bemoaning the cutting of arts funding when I complain so often about the Canada Council—arts funding is good, it’s a matter of how it’s organized and allotted, and Canadian arts funding has become a bloated circle-jerk which once produced great works and now produces nothing but tepid hackery and condescending identity slop.

2. An aside I’m leaving here because I’m ON VACATION and thought about it as I was finishing and didn’t wanna find somewhere to plug this in, but Leonard both tells aspiring screenwriters to write a commercial spec script so that they can get their foot in the door and have leverage to have more freedom, but also tells them basically that work that doesn’t consider a mass audience is indulgent and denying care, so what would the “artistic freedom” you’re supposed to buying even be for?

3. Bonus assumption: Leonard makes the mistake of assuming that all skills in writing are transferable. Some can do it, but I think it would be ridiculous to assume that, for instance, William Gaddis could write a Harry Potter novel or something.