(2002-04-15) k

Michael Wolff on Jay Chiat (and Frank Gehry, and Steve Jobs, and Kevin Costner, etc.). I said I had a theory that the whole PC-Internet-Napster overthrow-the-media ethos is a Jay thing, that even his offices were part of this. That Jay is the patron saint (one of them, anyway) of the deconstructed age... "He just has to save everybody," Frank said with some grievance... I mean, you expect successful guys to be businesslike in their utterances. If you build museums and office buildings, like Frank, or, like Jay, if you've run one of the largest ad agencies (Chiat Day) in the country, getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars by Nissan to make car ads, for God's sake, what are you if not a business guy? But these two, I realized, haven't been socialized that way. They both talk like this - immoderately and precisely. If they think it, they say it. It's a rebel thing - quaint almost... He watches things go by and then messes with them. "Mr. Cool," Gehry calls him - not necessarily with approval either... In my theory about Jay and the PostModern age, Jay was the first guy to offer a picture of people living in the media world - demonstrating that we're in the media, rather than merely watching it... "Persuasion," Randy adds, "in Jay's hands becomes PostModern art."... Jay, in one longtime colleague's description, is "non-servile" - apparently an unexpected and deeply counterintuitive thing to be in the Advertising business (or in most businesses). I also wonder if non-servility and getting to do what you want, and not producing crap (see The Craft), have something to do with Failure - which Jay has been very good at... "It was great to be out of the agency business - I was euphoric. Not having clients felt like someone had taken an anvil off the base of my neck".

Apr25: Jay died