so after all being said and done, just wanted to add that i saw the Boredoms play with 88 drummers last night made possible by nike, and it was great, that at least seemed to be selling nothing (but the swoosh on the ticket) hmmm...

good Suicidal connection! well lets not forget the ones that stayed true- starting with ian mackaye- whose minor threat album nike tried to co-opt into an add by replacing his boots with cortez's. i think the idea is for the work to be clear where its coming from, know what it's selling and by who. its what i imagine we all want from our news, and after all for many of us art is a source of reporting..

The skateboarding culture of today is so far removed from its subversive/punk rock roots, there is no point in even discussing it. Most of todays skaters seem to be one keg stand away from being the fratboy jocks who used to chase me and my "skater fag" friends arund 20+ years ago. Either that or they would have been playing in a hair metal band. Have you seen that show on eMpTyV about the whiny rich kid skater? Yeah, me neither. But apparently it's like Tony Hawk heads to The Hills.

It used to bother me a little that this culture which seemed to be so much about integrity had become everything it used to be against, but I am over it now. Or maybe I am wrong in being nostalgic about the good old days. Maybe all my skate punk heroes from yester-year just seemed to have integrity because there was no one handing them bags of cash.

The starving artist is a cliche that has relevance between 18-25. After that, you start to need certain things, and where will the money come from?

It kind of reminds me of Salon.com.....brought to you by the U.S. Air Force.

Since when is it wrong to make money?

All these people are making art on their own terms, and getting corporations to give them money to do that, plain and smiple. the undertones of "selling out" in this review sounds like classic hater-talk to me.

But one of the central ideas of Beyond the Multiplex is to foreground cultural product that for various reasons is not validated by the market. Or at least is validated on a vastly smaller scale than, say, "The Dark Knight." So if that's what post-romantic means, I'll grab it. Mind you, I didn't invent the distinction between Hollywood and independent films, and there are times and places where it seems particularly meaningless. But over time and in a broad, general way, the terms do convey something. Do I possess what you would consider some "post-romantic" view of how good films get made? I doubt that very much.

And I still believe you've created a straw man here. Or you may be reading into my words a political or philosophical disagreement. I think it's clear enought in context that my use of terms like "corruption" and "selling out" is not quite straightforward. It's meant to be provocative, and to pose questions rather than answer them. I introduce the terms because they're in people's heads. I do not accuse any of these artists of being corrupt or of selling out, although I do accuse one of them of deluding himself. In fact I don't think those terms are clear, or do much to define these problems, but I also don't see the alternative as "It's all good, we all like to shop at Target."

Nor do I think that it's *better* to have an old-school art career -- by which I mean an art career of roughly the 1950s to the 1970s -- than to have some other kind. The term was descriptive. Do I hold to some old-fashioned idea of art history or art training? That's like asking whether I believe every American city should have streetcars instead of interstates.

Of course I'm not trying to be "value-neutral." A) There is no such thing, and B) This is supposed to be criticism. I am trying to suggest that in the totalizing system of consumer capitalism, in whose operations we all participate, the artist finds him- or herself in a peculiar pickle. (The podcast interviews I do for Salon are sponsored by Post Grape-Nuts.

They're delicious, all-natural and unsweetened!) I'm well aware that in the Renaissance artists had to make work that glorified the king or the church, but the argument that nothing is different about the institutionally ironic contemporary situation -- where artists who grow up within a DIY, punk-informed ethos are designing Nike sneakers before they're 30 -- strikes me as shallow. Tintoretto never pretended to be a rebel or a "beautiful loser," far as I know.

It is evident to me that the artists in "Beautiful Losers," even McFetridge, are uneasy around this question. As I wrote, Stephen Powers (probably the artist in this group whose work I like the best, personally) has stopped accepting commercial work and so, I think, has Mike Mills (who's immensely smart in talking about this stuff). The entire film vibrates to an odd, anxious frequency whenever the question comes up. If you believe it's a totally uncomplicated matter, just agents operating in a free market, then good for you. Not how it looks from here.

If you think you've rendered a objective, value-neutral summary of this particular manifestation of "pop art," you might want to reread the piece. Phrases like "selling out" certainly imply a common post-Romantic view of art and the artist, and the question you raise of whether an artist may become "corrupted" by the demands of the marketplace doesn't suggest a neutral perspective, either. I could go on to pull especially provocative sentences, even unpack whole paragraphs, starting with the third one, and going word for word to the bitter end, but I think everyone would rather I didn't.

Now, it's entirely possible that the view of art you're espousing in this piece -- including but not limited the importance of traditional art institutions (the villa, the palace, the university, the museum) and the value of an "old-school art career" -- is so culturally entrenched that it requires neither analysis nor defense. (Yet if that's the case, why are some of your readers, myself included, crying foul?) A post-Romantic view of art, especially in terms of its apparent hostility to Commerce, might even be a foundational assumption behind "Beyond the Multiplex" itself, in which case I've touched on something potentially more problematic than a quibble with a film review.