CASHING IN VS. SELLING OUT

When you’re staring into the barrel of a loaded bank account, what’s the difference?

From MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball, fall 1991. Sell out all you want: they still won’t spell your name right. Watching this episode was the first I heard of Nirvana. We didn’t have cable at home, but I was able to see it because I was on a Catholic Youth Group canoe trip in Vermont. Thank you, Jesus.

Some of you reading this will hit a paywall at the end of this paragraph because one of the purposes of my writing on this platform is to cash in, however humbly, on the reputation I made, such as it is, writing for magazines and newspapers. (Thank you for your ‘support’.) Everybody needs money, and most of us try to get it however we can, given our talents and our skills and the opportunities at hand. (I write book reviews and occasionally about movies.) That’s the world we live in, no matter what the future holds (farming bananas when you feel like it, or whatever). The word ‘sellout’ and the concept of ‘selling out’ have been in the air this week. I wonder why? Dan Brooks wrote a column for the Guardian the other day about it, and there has been some debate about it in the usual place regarding the new movie about the dolls. I suppose the question becomes is it possible to create a work of art that doubles as a feature-length commercial for a toy, not to mention an international hype extravaganza for said brand, financed to the tune of, I assume, hundreds of millions of dollars? But leaving aside those drearily pink and blond(e) specifics, is it possible to make a sellout masterpiece?