It turns out, “inside a Makó” is somewhere you too can quite literally go. This month, as part of NY Fashion Week, Makó teamed up with The Cultivist and Capital One to produce Bauhaus Ballet, an immersive six-room installation that turned his photographic universe into an Instagrammable playground. Visitors could, like Elle Fanning, pose on a massive porcelain plate or grope an oversized sardine. The timing makes sense: Makó is looming large in the current zeitgeist, and cultural cachet rarely goes long without finding increasingly commercial outlets. And who can resist an activation? The installation is another notch in the belt of a decade-long lineage of immersive, highly photographable environments, from Refinery29’s 29Rooms to the “Museum” of Ice Cream. In these spaces, the environment is complete except for a body to put in it. Haloscope founder Savannah Eden Bradley recently complained that while the muse isn’t dead, she has been flattened into the “content partner” – something Bradley describes as “a crime against glamour”. If a muse exerts pressure on an artist’s world, a content partner gets dropped into one that already exists. For Makó, that reversal feels particularly ill-matched: his best portraits are the ones in which the world has been built around the sitter. Here, anyone can step into that world without leaving a footprint.
As much as I’m loath to say it, there’s another slightly unfashionable term lurking around all this: selling out. The idea of selling out has always been a little puritanical (artists have to make money!), but I do wonder if we lost a useful concept when we replaced “selling out” with the frictionless corp-speak of “partnerships” and “collaborations”. “Selling out” at least acknowledged that commercial transactions came with potential consequences – the risk of diluting an artist’s work, or changing how we perceive them and their larger body of work. Instead, we pretend that an auteur can auction off their authorship while still emerging with it perfectly intact: Makó supplies his Makó-ness, the sitter supplies a face, the brand sponsor supplies a check, and everyone goes home as cool as ever. Yorgos Lanthimos can make a Squarespace ad whose primary creative proposition is that it looks like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie; Makó can make a Capital One activation whose primary proposition is that you get to be inside a Makó. In both cases, the artist’s value has gone from shaping a creative concept to being the concept.
This isn’t to say that serious artists shouldn’t make commercials! David Lynch made plenty of them. But there’s a big difference between giving artists money because you like their work and are excited to see what they come up with, and giving them money just because you want the pedigree of their name attached to yours.
I still love Makó’s work. I just hope that even if everyone wants a Makó, they leave Makó himself some room to surprise us with what that can mean.