{"id":849635,"date":"2026-09-16T09:50:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/849635\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T09:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:50:09","slug":"elizabeth-goodspeed-on-szilveszter-mako-and-the-commercial-appeal-of-the-auteur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/849635\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Goodspeed on Szilveszter Mak\u00f3 and the commercial appeal of the auteur"},"content":{"rendered":"

It turns out, \u201cinside a Mak\u00f3\u201d is somewhere you too can quite literally go. This month, as part of NY Fashion Week, Mak\u00f3 teamed up with The Cultivist<\/a> and Capital One to produce Bauhaus Ballet<\/a>, 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: Mak\u00f3 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\u2019s 29Rooms<\/a> to the \u201cMuseum\u201d of Ice Cream. In these spaces, the environment is complete except for a body to put in it. Haloscope<\/a> founder Savannah Eden Bradley<\/a> recently complained that while the muse isn\u2019t dead, she has been flattened into the \u201ccontent partner\u201d \u2013\u00a0something Bradley describes as \u201ca crime against glamour\u201d. If a muse exerts pressure on an artist\u2019s world, a content partner gets dropped into one that already exists. For Mak\u00f3, 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.<\/p>\n

As much as I\u2019m loath to say it, there\u2019s 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 \u201cselling out\u201d with the frictionless corp-speak of \u201cpartnerships\u201d and \u201ccollaborations\u201d. \u201cSelling out\u201d at least acknowledged that commercial transactions came with potential consequences \u2013\u00a0the risk of diluting an artist\u2019s 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: Mak\u00f3 supplies his Mak\u00f3-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<\/a> whose primary creative proposition is that it looks like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie; Mak\u00f3 can make a Capital One activation whose primary proposition is that you get to be inside a Mak\u00f3. In both cases, the artist\u2019s value has gone from shaping a creative concept to being the concept.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that serious artists shouldn\u2019t make commercials! David Lynch made plenty of them<\/a>. But there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I still love Mak\u00f3\u2019s work. I just hope that even if everyone wants a Mak\u00f3, they leave Mak\u00f3 himself some room to surprise us with what that can mean.<\/p>\n