In the tiny anteroom just behind the auditorium stage they could hear the swelling murmur of the crowd. The event, the dean said proudly, was sold out. Balding, in a black suit which he picked at so unfamiliarly it might as well still have had the price tag on it, the dean sat in a folding chair, smiling affably, trying to keep his knees from touching Osbourne’s or John’s. He did ask Osbourne, hopefully, if he would like to hear his introduction in advance, just to make sure there were no inaccuracies, nothing objectionable, unfortunately there was no written text to show him, it was all in the dean’s head. Osbourne smiled and said he was sure it would be fine.
It was fine; John and Mal stood in the wings and listened to it. The dean went on a bit long, working in Tocqueville and McLuhan and Jacques Ellul and Sonic Youth, but it was all quite thoughtful. Then Osbourne walked out to the podium, clapping the dean on the shoulder as they passed, and waited for the applause to die down.
It didn’t die down for quite some time.
“Let me tell you something about myself,” Osbourne began. “What I do is not advertising. Advertising is all about moving product. Or it’s all about envy. It’s all about sex, about lust, about instant gratification. Advertising is the beast. Well, I came here tonight, the first public appearance I’ve made in about seven years, because I have news to bring to you. The beast is dead. I have killed it.”
John couldn’t see Osbourne’s face. A shifting took place throughout the hall, making a rolling sound like something you might hear at night if you lived near the sea; then gradually, thrillingly, it turned into more applause.
“The good news is that advertising has left behind the husk of its form — as mighty an apparatus as the world has ever seen — and as with any form the question of content is wide open. Limited only by the imagination of artists. And yes, I said artists, because the idea that the commercial world may function only as a place where real artists, quote unquote, come to whore themselves — this is an idea upon which everyone agrees in advance, a ready-made idea, an established idea. Hence, a dead idea.
“It comes joined at the hip to another dead idea, namely that art which reaches the greatest possible audience is by definition bad art, because badness, by which is meant simplicity, must be the means of reaching that broad audience. This, to speak plainly, is bullshit. The work that we produce at our new institution, Palladio — great work, important work, from an artistic standpoint alone — what should we do, put it in a drawer, take it out and show it to our friends when they come over? No. As an artist I believe that I have something to say, and if I have something to say I use the greatest means of expression available to me. This seems obvious, to me. And yet we are vilified for it. The reason our art reaches millions and millions of people is because that’s the nature of the form. No matter how good or bad it is, how simple or how obscure, it will enter the consciousness of many, many millions of people. All the elitist defenders of the notion of high art — well, you’d think this would be a cause for them to flock to advertising, say hosannas in praise of it. ‘What a wonderful thing is advertising. A haven for great artists, where they don’t have to struggle, where they can say what they please with a built-in audience of millions.’ You don’t need me to tell you that this isn’t happening. The great thinkers of the academy haven’t figured it out. The business community hasn’t figured it out.
“I have figured it out.”
Laughter: for the first time in his life, John experienced the intoxicating effect produced by the laughter of a living, breathing, present audience. He took a step and tried to look out across the stage, to see some of the faces of those who had gathered to hear Osbourne’s address. But the stage lights were right in his face; he couldn’t make out anything past about the second row.
“I worked for years in the ad world, all through the seventies and eighties. I rose to the top of that profession. And I’ll tell you, the more successful and respectable I became, the more I was treated like a star, told I was an innovator, the more disgusted I became with myself. I knew that what I was doing was really just a kind of endless theme-and-variations, and that theme was the status quo. There was nothing new about it. Believe me, there was a period of a few years there where I considered just getting out of the ad business entirely. And yet, even when things were at their worst, I knew somehow, in my heart of hearts as they say, that advertising wasn’t failing me. I was failing it. There was an enormous, an unprecedented sort of potential there, if only I could figure out a way to get at it.”
Osbourne paused to sip from a glass of water. The hall was silent, and John, without realizing it, was holding his breath along with them until his boss started speaking again.
“I was also an art collector for many years,” Mal said. “Not out of a profit motive: I mean, the motive was for the artists to profit. I loved art, contemporary art, and if I was in a position to help subsidize these struggling young artists, to help them financially and to help them find a wider audience, then that’s what I wanted to do. But what happened was, the two sides of my life began to come together, philosophically, in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The art I saw was increasingly … well, I don’t want to say bad, it wasn’t bad. It was frustrated. It was hobbled by a sense of its own irrelevance, by a sense of the impossibility of mattering, of doing anything new. They were working for each other, really. It became totally, irremediably self-referential, and the basic paradox was that in order to gain acceptance as an artist, you had to make sure that you were working with precisely that small, knowing, insular, incestuous, ever-shrinking audience in mind. No wonder the artists were frustrated! To do what they were born to do, they had to enter a virtual monkhood, aesthetically speaking. They had to forgo any possibility of really mattering.
“At the same time, in my role as a partner and creative director at a major, quote-unquote cutting-edge advertising agency, I saw a number of highly gifted, ambitious, intelligent artists, artists with, in some cases at least, all the good intentions in the world and a lot to offer the world, I saw them doing work that was just awful, mind-numbing, destructive, reactionary. And they were doing it for a staggering, massive, global audience — an audience so starved for a great popular art that these hacks were hailed as geniuses. Okay, not hacks, they weren’t hacks at all, but their work was hackwork, that’s the point. They were locked into a certain intellectual framework. Nothing they did was at all innovative, everything they fobbed off as new was in fact borrowed, tested, safe. And safety is the death knell for art. And these guys thought they were rebels. So I got to thinking if there wasn’t some way this seeming cultural wall, separating art and its audience, couldn’t be breached somehow. I went looking for artists who I thought would be open to this radical idea as a kind of unconventional avenue to fulfilling their own vision.
“We live in a period when the avant-garde has ceased to exist, where nothing shocks any longer because we’ve seen, done, violated, overthrown it all. What I discovered is that in order to find that avant-garde power again, you have to move into, paradoxically, the most banal of all media. The one place left, it seems, where certain kinds of ideas are forbidden to be expressed. Where the two partners in communication, called editorial and advertising, cling to the Enlightenment-age fiction of their irreconcilability with one another. It’s pretty late in the game, right now, if you’re an artist; if you want to do something interesting, something new, you have to forget books, forget painting, sculpture, theater, journalism, movies. You have to take on advertising. You have to enclose its incredible powers of destruction.