Bring back “selling out”
What if it wasn't always good to take the money?
The central conflict of the first episode of The Larry Sanders Show, the fantastic old HBO sitcom about a neurotic late-night TV host, is that the network executives tell Larry Sanders (Garry Shandling, RIP) to do live advertisements during his eponymous talk show, and Larry refuses. Larry’s reticence isn’t explained; when this episode first aired, in 1992, it would have been broadly understood that even someone as corny as a late-night host had some version of artistic principles and that doing live commercials was lame. In the early ‘90s, narratives pitting corporate America against pure but poor artists were everywhere. That same year, 1992, was when Wayne’s World came out, in which goofy, lovable Mike Myers and Dana Carvey are manipulated by Rob Lowe’s slick corporate villain. In 1994, Reality Bites had Winona Ryder choosing between soulful loser Ethan Hawke and television executive (boo!) Ben Stiller. When Green Day signed with a major label before recording their smash hit album Dookie, they were pilloried by the fellow Bay Area punks as sellouts. The idea that money and popularity corrupted art was taken for granted.
This attitude is now gone. We killed it. That sneering, jaded, Gen X gatekeeping got stale. Dookie is a great album, seminal even (in both senses of the word). Popularity isn’t a sin. The idea that it’s bad for more people to like something never made sense.
Dave Eggers articulated the anti-anti-sellout philosophy in 2000, responding to an overmatched Harvard Advocate journalist who asked him, “Are you taking any steps… to keep shit real?” The author and magazine editor took exception to this. People called Eggers a sellout because his Might magazine got big and he became famous and, as he put it “my goddamn picture has been in just about every fucking magazine and newspaper printed in America.” But he didn’t care about being a sellout, he wrote — the money he made from gigs at Esquire and Time and Forbes (all extremely uncool, sellout-y places, by ‘90s standards) he gave away to artists and charities. And in any case, accepting the logic of “selling out” would have meant saying no to opportunities.
“No is for wimps,” Eggers wrote. “No is for pussies1. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.”
Another 2000s icon, Clay Davis, the charming, amoral politician from The Wire, had a slightly more downmarket way of expressing roughly the same sentiment: “I’ll take any motherfucker’s money if he’s giving it away.”
Over time, the philosophy of Davis and Eggers won out. Maybe that’s because not many people really cared about “selling out,” in practice. Maybe it had something to do with the internet ravaging the film, television, publishing, radio, record, and journalism industries all at once — when the old revenue streams turn bone-dry, can you really blame artists for cashing in however they can?
Eggers called the sellout-obsessed hipsters of his day “cowardly” and “lazy.” They certainly were obnoxious. In hindsight, they seem pathetically naive. But they were performing a vital function. They were the culture’s white blood cells — tiny soldiers that defend the body against infection. Too many white blood cells can cause cancer, but too few and you’re susceptible to all kinds of sickness.
We can see what happened without these defenders. By the 2010s success and popularity were no longer uncool. Everyone was saying yes, everyone was taking the money, and everyone agreed that was fine. Comic book movies were stocked with award-winning actors and nearly universally acclaimed. “Poptimist” music critics dared to ask, “What if the songs everyone liked were also the best songs?” Justin Bieber performed in Saudi Arabia; Beyoncé entertained Muammar Gaddafi’s son. Writing and art, increasingly, were referred to as “content.” A “content creator” was someone who aspired to attract a big enough following to do ads. Ads were now called “sponsored content” and everyone was doing them; at one point a shaving company even underwrote an entire online men’s magazine. John Cena accidentally referred to Taiwan as a “country” and issued a grovelling apology, in Mandarin, to the Chinese government. LCD Soundsystem, the most beloved indie band of my New York young adulthood, came out of retirement to wind up playing a gig for Bored Ape Yacht Club, the NFT collective. Larry David did a Super Bowl commercial for crypto exchange FTX. Every single podcast host does ad reads, the thing that troubled Larry Sanders so much.
More recently, Saudi Arabia, the theocratic monarchy whose agents (allegedly) dismembered the U.S. journalist Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw, held a comedy festival. Kevin Hart and Bill Burr performed. Even by today’s loosey-goosy standards, this was a bit much for some people, like Human Rights Watch and podcaster-comic Marc Maron, who said, “The same guy that’s gonna pay them is the same guy that paid that guy to bone-saw Jamal Khashoggi and put him in a fucking suitcase.”2
Even more recently, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino announced she was “breaking [her] previously RIGID sponcon ban” to collaborate with Airbnb on an “experience” in which paying customers (starting at $65) could go to the McNally Jackson bookstore in Brooklyn and have Tolentino recommend them books. The comments on her Instagram post announcing this collaboration are overwhelmingly negative — Tolentino has spoken out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but in this venture she is working with (or for) Airbnb, a company that pro-Palestine activists have boycotted because it lists properties in East Jerusalem settlements.
One wonders, contra Eggers, if sometimes “no” isn’t just for wimps.
You can argue about how bad any of this is. You can always argue. Burr defended his appearance at Riyadh by saying Saudi audiences “needed it.” Fellow humanitarian-comic Whitney Cummings claimed that anyone who worked with Live Nation had taken Saudi money, by virtue of Saudi Arabia’s onetime investment in the ticketing platform, and accused the festival’s critics of “racism.”
New York magazine3 rounded up some anonymous takes about “Jiabnb” and the ones that defended her were positively Eggersian — weren’t Tolentino’s critics being petty and jealous? “The reactions to Jia in particular seem motivated more by Schadenfreude than a concern for ethics,” one person said. “I don’t think it’s sexist to criticize her, but I think many criticisms of her are sexist (or racist).” Another excused Tolentino on the grounds that “child care is expensive.”
The human brain is a marvelous thing. If you really want to accept someone’s money, your brain will find a reason why doing so is the right thing. Maybe the brand giving you the money isn’t even asking you to do anything you wouldn’t already do. Maybe you only take money from “brands whose values align with mine,” or whatever, and it turns out that actually a lot of brands have really good values. And shouldn’t you say yes to opportunities to expand your audience? Besides, are you really hurting anyone? Is anyone in Saudi Arabia better off because Shane Gillis turned down an offer to perform in Riyadh? Are any Palestinians worse off because Tolentino is doing some Airbnb thing? Anyway, if it really is bad to take the money, you can give the money to charity, but also, couldn’t your family use the money? (Child care is expensive!) If you don’t say yes to something, someone else will. Everyone does this kind of thing. Do you think you’re better than them?
The people and institutions offering this money to writers, artists, “creators,” whoever, are in most cases not cartoonish villains. They will explain why this deal they’re offering makes the world a better place, actually. But they understand, maybe better than you do, what they’re buying: not anything as crass as an obligation, but rather an association. By signing up Tolentino, Airbnb gets to be the kind of company that offers its customers things like facetime with New Yorker writers; it gets an infusion of cache, class. Tolentino lends Airbnb some fraction of her aura or vibe, whatever you want to call it. Someone might ask, How bad could Airbnb be, if people like Jia are working with them? And if Tolentino wants to criticize Airbnb in the future, she’s unavoidably going to look like a hypocrite.
The opportunity to sell out isn’t limited to the famous or even the talented. The sponcon industry is sprawling and many-tentacled. Anyone with 10,000 followers (not that many, these days) will likely get some brand or business reaching out about some “partnership” or another. Or maybe even a foreign government. Back in 2013, there was a minor scandal after some conservative writers (including a couple who are still prominent) got tens of thousands of dollars from Malaysian interests to write some stories about Malaysia. Years later, the Russian government allegedly funneled money to right-wing American pundits who were producing content Russia agreed with (to be fair, in that case the pundits didn’t know where the money came from).
The point is, there is money sloshing around, and there are many, many ways to get your hands on some. I’ve availed myself of this sort of thing before. I’ve done “branded content,” almost all of it forgettable but well-paid. The most sellout-y moment of my career was getting paid to edit some stories about the United Nations that were bankrolled by big tobacco. I didn’t understand why that piece of branded content existed and I didn’t ask, I just took the money. I can make excuses — this was in the middle of the pandemic, my wife and I were both unemployed — but the truth is I simply welcomed the easy cash.4
Of course, anyone who accepts payment for creative work can be accused of selling out. I work in “lifestyle” journalism now, a field sustained by ads from, for instance, credit card companies. Even in the hypothetical case of a painter who makes a full-time living selling her paintings to collectors — and therefore is entirely outside the grubby content industry — has to sell her paintings to someone, and that someone is probably in tech, or oil, or weapons, or who knows what. Money doesn’t grow on trees; it flows through the economy like a river with a thousand-million tributaries, and high up in the headwaters of that river is always pain and blood. You can’t dip your hand in without it getting stained.
That’s the kind of thing you say when your brain is persuading you to take the money: No one’s hands are clean, so why should I care about how dirty mine get?
The purest form of the anti-sellout argument has always been ridiculous. It’s natural for writers and artists to want to get paid for their work, and that’s going to entail some tradeoffs. If you don’t have a stash of family money or marry someone rich, there’s even more pressure on you to turn your artistic work into a viable career. Or you may find yourself in a situation where you need money, however you can get it. In the course of doing that, you might end up crossing a line and betraying your principles.
Which is fine — everyone crosses a line sooner or later. We’re all living in the same imperfect world.
But crossing a line isn’t the same thing as pretending there isn’t one. If artists don’t stand for anything beyond money, what is the point? The brands that fund art and writing and television through their ad dollars view all “content” as just a way to attract audiences to their ads — but the “creatives” making that content shouldn’t see it that way. If you have real talent, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to trade it in for cash. But you know, everyone knows, deep down, that that is almost always a bad deal.
If you liked reading this, please tell someone about it in real life.
You could still get away with saying “pussies” in 2000.
A comedian named Tim Dillon who took the gig said on a podcast, “So what if they have slaves, they’re paying me enough to look the other way,” which, amusingly, led to him getting fired by the Saudis before he performed.
Routine disclosure: I work for the company that owns New York.
Would I have taken the Airbnb deal Tolentino took? Probably not, but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t have let Airbnb give me a number first.
1. Yes, thank you
2. It's remarkable how many bad things trace their origins back to Dave Eggers
3. I think a lot of people just don't understand how intense the Pareto distribution curve is in this business - because it's a poverty industry they assume everyone is in poverty. Tolentino's first book went to auction as the hottest property of that year and sold very, very well. I promise, she made a ton of money and could make a lot more if she just deigned to write another book.
Great article. Keep on writing!