Marketing isn’t the root of all evil. But, if evil exists, marketing’s probably involved. And, for creative types trying to survive in a world generally hostile to their values and intentions, marketing can serve as a kind of anti-life navigation system, offering a thousand opportunities to sell out and ten-thousand more to destroy oneself.
Marketing also keeps the lights on, puts food on the table, and may even allow an artist to run a convincing simulation of normal life if she’s very lucky and not overwhelmingly stupid. It’s everywhere all the time. We engage with its principles, its ubiquity, on a daily basis. This is why, as writers and artists, we often don’t like to talk about marketing or even acknowledge it exists.
It’s a great servant but a terrible master. When we’re honest, we’ll admit it’s usually functioning as the latter not the former in our lives. It’s an invisible presence everywhere we go, our dark passenger, the demon elephant in the center of the room that we can’t bear to look at but around which everything else moves. Like this paragraph, marketing runs on clichés, uses clichéd logic and clichéd sensibilities to transform art into commerce.
Marketing sees creative works in terms of units, thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the greatest novels ever written because of its sales figures, considers a velvet painting of a dolphin under the moon superior to van Gogh’s Sunflowers due to consumer research in China and data from post-menopausal office workers who can name every Kenny G album in order of release. Marketing has no taste. It’s crass, often dumb, and worships the bottom line. But I couldn’t say these things yesterday to a group of fashion design students in their early 20s.
I work in an academic department that houses a fashion design merchandising program. And sometimes, because I’m an old, often befuddled, straight white guy who looks like he found his wardrobe jumbled up in the “Men’s Bin” of a dollar store, I stand out to post-adolescents who want everything to be cool, edgy, beautiful, and, above all else, culturally relevant. In a perfect world, we’d never speak, since explaining the arcana of fashion to someone like me would be tantamount to explaining the physics of a bicycle to a cockroach. But, for better and worse, we don’t live in a perfect world.
In this one, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with the interesting, friendly fashion design professors, who are always willing to answer my questions about what they do. And I’ve even had a few conversations with some of the less insecure and fragile program undergraduates—who no doubt took down their dolphin wall art last summer; though, mom probably couldn’t bear to toss it and put it back up in the den.
What I am able to say to these students (especially since they are not my students) is very limited. As for the question of whether it’s possible to lead a creative life and also make a living at it, I do not talk about the amount of suffering that normally entails. I don’t tell them to enjoy these years because art school (of any sort) is a beautiful opportunity for them to focus exclusively on their creative work without having to labor in a basement and worry about food stamps.
I don’t point out that getting a college education is tantamount to buying time and that, even if they aren’t on student loans, they’re on existential student loans. They’re staking years of their lives on a gamble that these studies are going to mean something. Unfortunately, many of them seem to be waiting around to be told what that something is.
There are no answers, I could say. There aren’t even questions. There’s only time and space, what you want to do versus what you have to do, and the attendant marketing. But these are the ideas of someone who’s been working in a creative field for almost 30 years—not a 22-year-old in a fashion program worrying whether her top is culturally relevant.
As Hemingway writes in “The Capitol of the World,” about the young Spanish waiter who gets killed while pretending to be a bullfighter, “He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had the time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had the time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.” That’s a perfect expression of what I saw in my recent conversation with four fashion students—they haven’t had the time to even understand that there are things they don’t understand.
It’s perfect except that I hope they live to somehow broker a peace between their illusions and the harshness outside their university incubator—if only because, like the young man in Hemingway’s story, they’re beautiful, noble, and so very ignorant in seemingly equal proportion. And who doesn’t love that combination?
I also went to art school. For me, it was an MFA creative writing program close enough to the black sun of the Manhattan publishing industry that the amount of status anxiety, absurd catty competitiveness, Machiavellian exploitation, desperation, and self-marketing (which, at times, seemed more like a highly intentional, entrepreneurial form of prostitution) met and exceeded anything I’ve seen in these fashion students. That’s good, I suppose. But, like a spouse, maybe you tend to get the person you deserve. Nobody’s innocent. If you marry a good person who can stand you, it means you did something right. If you go to an art school that doesn’t kill you with marketing, maybe you’ll be okay.
There’s only time and space and how you choose to spend it. I wish more people would choose to spend it making art. I wish fewer people would spend it worrying about marketing themselves and whether they’re going to be able to get married to someone beautiful, travel to new and exotic locations, make their parents proud, attain true and lasting happiness, and be famous all before the advanced age of 30. But maybe I haven’t had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week. I’m not trying to be a bullfighter. I know what life is all about. Right?
