"He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that make them into salable magazine stories.

I had been shocked at this and said I thought it was whoreing. He said it was whoreing but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books. I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best they could write without destroying their talent. He said that he had learned to write the stories for the Post so that they did him no harm at all."

-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I was attracted to advertising because I’m bad at choosing. Advertising exists at the intersection of business and art—the two fields that interest me most. I didn’t want to be a starving artist, or a financial-sector philistine. I wanted the best of both worlds, and advertising gave me the opportunity to straddle.

However, the relationship between advertising’s two parents is not always trouble-free. Artistic ambitions and business realities grind and wrestle with each other like tectonic plates at San Andreas. Very few agencies manage to divide their energies successfully between both.

I saw with some sadness this month that Droga 5, one of the last first-rate independent creative agencies in the world, had been sold to Accenture, a giant consultancy. Like W+K, Droga had cultivated a reputation for outstanding, off-the-wall creative work, and part of their brand was their independence.

They weren’t owned by a terrific European holding company. Their CEO didn’t answer to a fantastically over-paid hedge-fund manager. They were free to pursue the art of advertising with minimal interference from shareholders—and they did it so well and became so valuable that they finally couldn’t resist the offer when a conglomerate came knocking.

Their creative independence became a victim of their business success.

Art 0 Business 1

Now that Droga has sold out, Weiden & Kennedy is really the last of the great independent agencies.

[On an indulgent side note, I met Sir Martin Sorrell once. It was at VML’s 25th anniversary celebration. He was so short as to be diminutive, dressed in a long tweed overcoat, and his face looked like it was carved out of leather. Surprisingly, he looked like his work allowed him to get a lot of sun.

He was pleasant enough and very articulate, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how David Ogilvy once described him as “an odious little shit.” He was fired two months later, allegedly for paying prostitutes with company funds].

Hemingway, Fitzgerald & Dali

Anyway, this struggle between art and business is hardly unique to advertising. It’s something that all creative people deal with. I opened with that Hemingway quote because I thought it neatly summed up the problem. Do you create work that makes money, or do you create work that satisfies your standards as an artist? You can’t always do both.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, [the writer Hemingway was discussing] felt that as long as he wrote his stories to his specifications first, and then bent them into the shape the magazines wanted, he could maintain both his pride and a steady income.

This is great if you don’t mind “whoring.” [I don’t].

Hemingway refused to compromise, expecting the success and money to come on his own terms. It did, of course, but not before several lean years where he learned that “hunger was good discipline.”

For those of us who are not Hemingway, this feels like a risky gamble.

A third option is provided by the approach of Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter who was a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris. I have always loved Dali because he fully embraced surrealism—as much in his life as in his art

Unlike Hemingway, he did not seem to take himself very seriously. He would walk his pet anteater around Paris like a dog. He was successful in many different fields: art, fashion and even branding.

One of his most enduring—if not his best-known—works was the rather garish logo for Chupa Chups suckers. I don’t see these candies often in the US, but when I lived in England they were everywhere.

I wonder if it ever occurred to Dali, a serious artist by any measure, that he was “whoring” his talents by using them to design a logo for a garish children’s confection. I kind of doubt it. His understanding of his own talent was so broad that he was ready to try anything.

Nothing was beneath him.

Work like Chupa Chups allowed Dali to maintain the independence he needed to spend the rest of his time creating weird, totally un-marketable artistic shit like The Persistence of Time. In a way, allowing himself to sell out on a small scale meant he could keep his independence overall.

Maybe we just need a little more surrealism in our attitudes toward our work and our reputations. Goodness knows life is already surreal enough.

Anyway, I’ve done it again. I feel like all my thoughtful posts end on this note:

What if the real answer is just not caring as much?