Tonight’s installment of Portland State University’s Monday Night Lecture Series features Andrew Dickson, who is a very tall, very charismatic Portlander who charmed his way into a job at Weiden + Kennedy after a wildly successful “inspirational” PowerPoint-based show called AC Dickson: ebay Powerseller a few years back. Last fall, he parlayed the experience of going from scrappy DIY Portlander to high-rolling adman into a T:BA presentation, Sell Out. Having heard great things about ebay Powerseller I was less impressed than I expected to be with Sell Out—it seemed ultimately like self-justification flimsily disguised as self-parody. My criticisms, though, had much more to do with the substance of the show (which was kinda digressive and muddled, tone-wise) than with Dickson’s performance: He is a funny, funny man, and if I can get out of the office at a reasonable hour tonight I will definitely be heading down to check out tonight’s presentation. Hopefully he’s worked out all his success-related angst and has cooked up something fun for us.

Fifth Avenue Cinemas, 510 SW Hall, Room 90, FREE

Here’s an interview John Motley did with Dickson a few years back; and Chas and I had slightly different takes on Sell Out, so I’ll post his writeup and my response after the jump in case anybody’s interested.

Chas is like:

For the second time in three years, Andrew Dickson paced the atrium of Weiden + Kennedy last night, busting the audience up with Sell Out, a PowerPoint-driven narrative about his search for a meaningful career and steady income, despite his lacksidasical attitudes about work and his true vocation as an artist. But much has changed in the years since he premiered AC Dickson: eBay Powerseller at TBA:04. Namely, he’s got a lot more change jingling in his pocket thanks to his most recent transformative venture: selling out.

If you’ve never seen Dickson in action before, do yourself a favor and catch him now. It’s been years since his last big Portland show, and now that he’s coming up with snappy ads at Weiden+Kennedy for Fortune 500 companies, it could be a while before we get the chance to see him in his element again. The guy is effortlessly charming and hilarious in a way that only a 6’6” guy with a mop of curly hair and a too-small t-shirt can be, and Sell Out lets him bust loose with a few provocative ideas and tons of funny anecdotes.

A rocker/artist/filmmaker/pennypincher by birthright, Dickson officially “sold out” to become an ad man a few years ago, and this show is clearly an attempt for the artistic side of his brain to reconcile the life decision recently made by the more pragmatic side. To put it mildly, Dickson is all for “selling out,” and through a very funny slideshow, walks the audience through 27 necessary steps to do just that. For instance:

#1—Grow up middle class.
#12—Cultivate your street cred.
#13—Declare you’ll never sell out.
#19—Blow some minds.
#26—Have your justifications ready.

Dickson’s position is that the current economic and cultural climate make it impossible to live as an entirely uncorrupted artist, free of any sort of commercial sponsorship, which he argues, very rightly, are getting more and more discreet. These anti-corporate notions are propagated by liberal arts professors, whose university-subsidized housing is frequently underwritten by companies like Halliburton. Dickson maintains that the act of selling out as an American artist is inevitable in this day and age, and that to rally against it is a naive romanticism.

Of course, it sounds boring and grumpy when I condense it like this, but Dickson’s good at what he does, and whatever your leaning, you’ll likely be nodding enthusiastically at things that surprise you, between your laughter. Dickson is a master at the throw-away aside, and his tossed off lines are frequently sidesplitting. (On his childhood gymnastics class: “Didn’t like the unitard. Got dizzy. Only boy in the class.”)

I’ve had private conversations with Dickson over the years about selling out, and in our conversations, he posited a lot of nuanced questions that were a lot harder to answer than the ones raised in Sell Out. For the sake of this performance, selling out meant little more than taking a real job, whereas we’ve had long talks before about things like the implications of Portland rockers the Shins licensing their songs to Burger King. When Dickson spoke last night about his stint as the public face of a major Starbucks campaign two Christmases ago, he steered clear of the major gripes that people have about the company, such as its problems with unions, the company’s adverse effect of small businesses, and that whole little problem about bean farmers and fair trade. Starbucks is hardly the most evil company in the world, but I know that Dickson thinks about these implications, and I would have liked to hear more about that.

But as an advertiser, you sell the sizzle, not the steak, and Dickson has that down pat. His performance was fast-paced and riotous, and I can’t imagine anybody not liking this show. If your TBA tastes lean more toward funny and hip than artful and precious, Sell Out is a must-see. But I’d like to see Dickson push the idea even further, to convince an idealistic hopeful like myself that selling out is the great solution, as his performance suggests.

And then I'm all like:

>>But I’d like to see Dickson push the idea even further, to convince an idealistic hopeful like myself that selling out is the great solution, as his performance suggests.

I think this is what bothered me about the show. The 27-step, self-help style program for "selling out" was very funny, and very astute. Had he left it at that, it would've been a clever sendup of the predictable trajectory of wanna-be artists. That's the level on which most of the jokes worked, for me—self-recognition. "Yeah, you got me, I'm a liberal middle class wanna-be writer," etc.

What didn't work so well was his justification of selling out. I think the show kind of fell apart at that point—when he started comparing the salaries of teachers and lawyers to illustrate how success-driven our culture has become (a point which wasn't particularly well-supported and which i don't find convincing; have we ever not been success driven?), and telling us that people aren't willing to buy art these days, so artists might as well roll over and sell out. At that point, it seemed as though his message shifted: Instead of explaining selling out as a decision made by an adult who gets tired of living in basements and decides to pursue shit like a house, kids, and health insurance, selling out suddenly becomes this depressing inevitability forced upon artists by a society that doesn't value their work at all. Just because teachers make significantly less than lawyers doesn't mean that they should; doesn't mean that our society's values are in the right place; doesn't mean that I should just accept that no one cares enough about art to pay for it, and that the only art that gets air time is corporate sponsored. Dickson's show seemed to contain a resigned acceptance of those facts, and I don't understand why. At a certain point, it started to feel like an elaborate self-justification from someone who might not be as comfortable with selling out as he'd like us to believe. Either that, or it just wasn't as well thought out as it needed to be to convince a room full of (bright) young artist types that selling out is the way to go.