…is because, as Jay Springett is fond of saying, no one’s buying.

But perhaps they are? The FT has a brief piece here on the emerging thing for fashion houses bankrolling cinema projects, including the latest Jim Jarmusch piece. There are a lot of things one might say about Jarmusch as a filmmaker, but “sell-out” isn’t one of them—he’s a stubbornly non-commercial artist. If dressing his actors in YSL means he can actually make his films, then why the hell not?

Ultimately, the hope for many luxury brands is to expand the horizons of that world-building exercise that they need to excel at.

On one level, this sits uneasily with me; I may be late Gen X, but if anything we were the end that went hardest on the whole Not Selling Out ethos. But, well—refer back to Jay’s riff. There were still small shitty venues for your third-rate band to play in during the mid-90s; there were still flea-pit cinemas, and distributors that might put your weird little film into some of them. There were routes that avoided the high street, so to speak.

Now? Not so much—which is ironic, given the whole utopian promise of “the internet” was that it was going to do away with the middlemen. Which it did, very briefly, only to replace them with a different set of middlemen.

Which means that if you’re not paying to play, you’re likely not playing at all—unless you’re playing on the platforms, in which case you’re still paying, only with something far closer to your soul than even the record labels of old ever dared ask for.

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So we’re back to patronage—only now the patrons are other, bigger brands. More interestingly still, it’s not aristo largesse, either; people are spending less on high fashion these days, so the fashion houses want to “expand their narratives”. This is being thought of as long-game marketing; an investment, rather than arts philanthropy.

There’s some concern in the FT piece about taint: “Will fashion’s increased financial and creative power in Hollywood help revive an industry? Or create two-hour advertisements?” Well, it’s not like Hollywood hasn’t played the product placement game before. Again, Gen X me finds it a little skeevy—but I guess I’d rather watch a movie in which the characters parade around in weird-ass high-fashion clothes than one in which the characters all drink conspicuously from cans of a particular brand of soft drink. And I’d definitely rather have Yves Saint Laurent’s thumb on the narrative scale than that of the US military, who have a long history of supporting popular propaganda with payments in kind.

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I already write fiction for corporations and institutions, so in one sense I’ve already crossed the sell-out line—though fiction for foresight is a different thing to fiction as art, as I’ve argued elsewhere. Would I write pure fiction for a sponsor? It would depend on who the sponsor was, and what they were paying, and how free my hand would be over the final work—but I’m certainly not ruling it out on broad principle. I’m an artist; if someone will pay for my work, I’m interested.

You know the old not-actually-a-joke about freelance work? “You can have it fast; you can have it cheap; you can have it done well. Choose two of those three options.”

What would the sponsored art version be? Perhaps: “You can have it cheap; you can have it with my name on it; you can have final say over it.”

Or maybe not? Someone who writes scripts for online video says in this interview that they charge more if the client wants to white-label the work as their own, which makes sense from a commercial POV… but is writing YouTube scripts art? (It’s an art, certainly, but that’s not necessarily the same thing.)

Answers on a postcard, etc etc.