2blowhards.com: Apatoff on Artists "Selling Out"

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June 22, 2009

Apatoff on Artists "Selling Out"

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

David Apatoff over at his Illustration Art blog posted some interesting thoughts on artists "selling out" to commerce.

You should read the whole thing here. But I can't resist his discussion of Claude Monet, who refused to sell out during hard times early in his career. Instead, he begged and borrowed relentlessly. Eventually, as Apatoff notes:

Because he couldn't afford medical care for his family, his wife Camille suffered through a long illness with tuberculosis before dying painfully at the age of 32. Some say she died of pelvic cancer, but others say she died of a botched abortion because she and Monet could not afford to have a third child.

Don't think Monet's artistic dedication was compromised by Camille's tragic death; he told a friend that he was interested in the way Camille's face changed color after she died, so he recorded the change in a painting ...

Now that's what I call principle.

Later,

Donald

posted by Donald at June 22, 2009

Comments

for economics reasons, they've been accused to be considered for a commercializing their artwork

Posted by: Lukisan Minimalis on June 22, 2009 2:48 PM

Ah, what could be better than a link to an illustrator using the death of Monet's wife to impugn the values and morals of the artist who many blame/credit with ushering in modernism in visual art? To tell the story of Monet's early poverty, and relationship with various family and friends, in a two-paragraph version that boils down to "he let his wife die so he wouldn't need to compromise his art" is rather seriously distorted. Kind of like the old "Caravaggio was a murderer, thug, and probably homosexual, but he painted great pictures."

Now, I regularly say I'd be only too happy to sell out ... if only I could find a buyer ... but this entire notion has become such a cliché it is no longer particularly meaningful. There is no bright line that marks where and when a principled individual artist crosses over from doing "art for art's sake" (a silly and skewed phrase) to "selling out" for money. A gallery may suggest that a particular series seems to be selling better than another. If the artist chooses to paint more works in the same style as that series s/he might be accused of "selling out" ... or not. I'm sure anyone modestly conversant with art has a list of artists they consider "sell outs".

There IS, however, a more clear-cut distinction to be made between illustration along with other commercial art and fine art painting. The latter is intended to stand on its own as a complete aesthetic expression even when commissioned, the former is a piece of a larger enterprise in the service of a client's needs related to depicting a scene from a story, selling a car, or getting someone to buy the magazine. To keep setting up wrestling matches between illustration and fine art painting is both a perennial parlor (or now blog) entertainment and a fruitless exercise.

Posted by: Chris White on June 22, 2009 4:35 PM

Michaelangelo, Titian, Donatello, etc...were all "sell outs" as well.

Posted by: Eyck on June 22, 2009 4:57 PM

I've read T Dormandy's absolutely fascinating medical and cultural history of TB. I don't remember with certainty, but I'm pretty sure treatment of TB in those days had an effectiveness very near zero.

However, poverty was something of a risk factor for acquiring it in the first place.

Posted by: Eric Johnson on June 22, 2009 10:43 PM

O, my! That is terrible! Pupu can no longer admire the shimmering lights of the lily pond without worrying it was contaminated by the color of death in Camille's face.

Posted by: pupu on June 23, 2009 12:17 AM

That was a good read. I'm deeply suspicious of the whole notion of artistic integrity anyway...

Posted by: Martin Regnen on June 23, 2009 2:48 AM

"Selling out" is not making money with your art. Selling out is when you compromise moral standards or your own artistic vision for money. Even if you have to make a living working for somebody else, you should still be able to say what you want to say with work you do outside of commissions.

Selling out is when you wholly abandon your personal vision for money.

Posted by: BTM on June 23, 2009 9:09 AM

Then again, artists and entertainers often do their best work for money, and sometimes do their worst work for their "art."

I wonder if the whole "selling out" worry is going by the bye. Product placements, sponsorship, etc? I notice that my younger arty friends don't condemn 'em, they seek 'em out.

"Selling out" has been discussed and worried over for decades as though it's a perennial and eternal art-concern. But maybe it isn't, maybe it's a function of a specific place and time.

Another for instance: A big surprise for me when I lived in France for a year was the French attitude towards art. In the US circa 1970, art was one thing, commerce another, artists were heroic rebels, etc. In France, art was ... Well, entertainment. High end art was luxury goods. Fashion designers and jewelers were artists too. That still seems to hold. No one complains about Monica Bellucci doing perfume or jewelry ads (or cheesecake photo sessions) as well as her acting gigs. A Cartier ad with a gorgeous shot of Monica ... It's all part of Monica putting the Monica thing out there. And Monica wearing Cartier in a recent Blier film? You got a problem with that? Why?

I think it's totally something to notice if/when an artist doesn't seem to be engaged in his / her work, or has lost interest. But whether the work was art-motivated or commerce-motivated? Whether it was intended to stand alone or serve some other purpose? I couldn't care less. I mean, these are interesting facts to know, often. But they seem to me to have zero relevance to whether it's a good work, let alone whether it gives me any pleasure.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on June 23, 2009 11:00 AM

Most artists will tell you they work best under a constraint. A constraint can be anything: a commission, a certain medium, etc. It's when there are no constraints that many artists lose their way.

Posted by: JV on June 23, 2009 11:46 AM

Brian Moore the novelist used to tell how people talking to him about painful experiences would sometimes accuse him of listening to their disclosures to get material. I believe he even wrote about his father accusing him on doing that while attending his father's deathbed.

I don't think Monet was being particularly monstrous in the way he used the colours of his dying wife's face for his art. Once you get far enough into an art, it begins to be something that's hard to turn off. I knew a photographer once who was incapable of looking at anything without thinking, "Hmmm, wonder if that would be a good shot?" He once walked up to a stranger and asked him to shift position so he would make a better subject for his photo. (At least he didn't ask the guy to move out of the way. I think the guy still threatened to hit my friend, though.)

Artists are funny people. And art does funny things to you. It's like anything consuming. It tends to, well, consume.

Posted by: PatrickH on June 23, 2009 12:07 PM

Most artists will tell you they work best under a constraint. A constraint can be anything: a commission, a certain medium, etc. It's when there are no constraints that many artists lose their way.

Then please explain the non-commission work of Sorolla, Sargent, Zorn, Boldini, Mucha, etc.

But whether the work was art-motivated or commerce-motivated? Whether it was intended to stand alone or serve some other purpose? I couldn't care less.

Forget the money--whose vision is it? Who is the real creator, the client or the artist?

Posted by: BTM on June 23, 2009 1:15 PM

BTM, I don't have to explain anything because of course there are always exceptions, which is why I said "most artists," not "all artists." Also, I'm not sure the ones you mentioned weren't working under a constraint, self-imposed or not. Maybe Sargent had to finish one of those non-commissioned works earlier than he wanted because he had a commissioned work to start. Etc.

Posted by: JV on June 23, 2009 2:21 PM

BTM, I don't have to explain anything because of course there are always exceptions...also, I'm not sure the ones you mentioned weren't working under a constraint, self-imposed or not.

Why is it such a great stretch of the imagination that a great artist would simply do something for the love of it, and not for money?

How calloused and jaded do you have to be to not see that this is true? How many examples do you want?

Selling out is giving up your own personal vision for the vision of somebody else. And the "well we share the vision" is not what I'm talking about.

Posted by: BTM on June 23, 2009 6:06 PM

I don't doubt artists, great and not so great, do things for the pure love of it all the time. But an exceedingly few get to do so as a vocation, and even those few most likely have an eye towards how to position their passion in order to keep making money off it. That is not a bad thing at all, in my opinion. Nor is taking on someone else's vision and making something personal out of it. Collaboration is a wonderful thing.

Posted by: JV on June 23, 2009 6:56 PM

those few... have an eye towards how to position their passion in order to keep making money off it. That is not a bad thing at all, in my opinion.

That's not what I'm talking about. What people mean by "selling out" is not doing your ideas, but somebody else's.

Nor is taking on someone else's vision and making something personal out of it. Collaboration is a wonderful thing.

By "selling out", people mean abandoning your vision or morals for money. Otherwise, what are they talking about?

Posted by: BTM on June 23, 2009 8:11 PM

At first I read "Apatow", as in Judd Apatow. Same name, different spellings.

Posted by: green mamba on June 24, 2009 6:09 AM

I'm sure anyone modestly conversant with art has a list of artists they consider "sell outs".

A bit of an overstatement, Chris, I think. At any rate, I can't think of many artists in any field whom I regard as sell-outs. When great painters, sculptors, writers etc. produce sub-standard but popular work, it's usually because they've lost contact with the culture, exhausted their vision, or grown too old to care.

The implication about Monet in the original post seems to be that he ought to have given up on painting altogether, the old "get a REAL job" chorus beloved by fathers everywhere.

One "sell-out" I can come up with, btw, is - ahem - Stephen King. A man with an obvious talent for story-telling and character creation who panders to the worst tastes in his audience by inflating his work to absurd lengths, spoiling what might have been classics of their genre. I'm
thinking of The Shining here in particular; perhaps he's improved in recent years?

Posted by: aliasclio on June 24, 2009 9:53 AM

I don't see "selling out" that way at all. To me the "integrity/sellout" dichotomy looks more like a way of enforcing and policing the social norms of the arts community and its various sections. I suppose every community needs its standards and something to enforce them, so there's nothing really wrong with that, even I don't particularly care for those standards myself.

Posted by: Martin Regnen on June 24, 2009 10:03 AM

To me the "integrity/sellout" dichotomy looks more like a way of enforcing and policing the social norms of the arts community and its various sections.

I deeply disagree with this. It's the widespread acceptance of this sort of attitude among sculptors, painters, writers, etc (I was taught in art school never to use the word "artist") that has led thousands of artists, both talented and talentless, to think they can only be artistic when being "transgressive". Thus the rise of every kind of shock and schlock in the name of art.

The very greatest artists in the Western tradition, from Shakespeare to Breughel, from the successful to those unnoticed in their own time (Emily Bronte, van Gogh), produced their work under the weight of massive social constraints, both formal and informal, that people today can hardly begin to imagine. And yet they managed to create lasting works which often turn out to contain "transgressive" messages of their own kind, for those with the wit to see them.

It's arguable, I suppose, that Shakespeare might have improved some of his work if he hadn't "pandered" to his audience's low tastes: the witches in Macbeth used to be a favourite target of critics. But I don't think his work would have been improved by open attacks on the social and political order of his day. In a sense, his plays' greatness rests on the way they set up great (if flawed) human beings and give them brilliant words to speak, words that make the reality of life dull and trivial in comparison, and lead us to think about what life could be like, if only...

Breughel managed the same kind of feat by setting ordinary, dull people in glorious landscapes, so that anyone looking at them must wonder, "why do we always fall so short of what we could be?"

Anyway, that's art, not pandering or selling out.

Posted by: aliasclio on June 24, 2009 3:59 PM

I don't know if that's what Martin meant, clio. I got from his comment that "selling out" is merely a term used to differentiate commerce vs. "true" art in order to artificially prop up those "true" artists. I agree with this for the most part.

Your take on Shakespeare is interesting. For me, he doesn't make me think of what ordinary life could be if only; his writing brings the mundane struggles of daily life into sharp focus. I'm not saying either is correct, just pointing out how good art can be taken many ways.

Posted by: JV on June 24, 2009 4:38 PM

Ah, that comment of mine was meant mostly as a reply to BTM. Probably makes more sense in that context.

What I meant, though, was that as a musician I'm expected to behave in certain ways in public. Mainly I'm supposed to pretend to not be interested in money and not interested in being liked by people. If I'm not good at pretending I'll be called a sellout which will limit the kinds of work I can get. Fortunately it will mostly keep me from getting gigs that are "really cool" but don't pay all that well if they pay at all, so it's not really that bad. (Around promoters and record labels, of course, I have to pretend to be interested in nothing but short-term financial gain so I get paid well. But that's another story.)

I think the main purpose these rules of integrity and the ostracism of violators serve is to maintain the high social status of artists: even if you're poor you're pretty cool and have no trouble making friends or getting laid. That's fine and I can understand why other people want to preserve that. Personally I'd rather get less status and more money so I find all this stuff pretty inconvenient, but to some degree I have to play the game to get ahead.

I wrote a longer and angrier post about artistic integrity last year, inspired largely by Michael's "Weirdos and Culture" post from a few years back: http://www.corrupt.org/columns/martin_regnen/artistic_integrity_as_an_evil_mutant

Posted by: Martin Regnen on June 25, 2009 3:32 AM