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# Weekend Words: Sell
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-sell/
- Published: 2013-11-17T14:03:04.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:34:17.000Z
- Description: This week, to keep a date at Christie's, a major painting skipped a major museum retrospective. That museum would be the Guggenheim, and the painting would be Christopher Wool's "Apocalypse Now" (1988): SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS. And sell it did.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:59 (2012, 2013, part 2)

![Pieter Aertsen, "Market Scene" (n.d.). Oil on oak, 127 x 85 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. (Image via Web Gallery of Art) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/11/sell.jpg)

Pieter Aertsen, “Market Scene” (n.d.). Oil on oak, 127 x 85 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. (image via Web Gallery of Art)

This week, to keep a date at Christie’s, a major painting skipped a major museum retrospective. That museum would be the Guggenheim, and the painting would be Christopher Wool’s “Apocalypse Now” (1988): SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS. And sell it did.

> “Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.”  
>  
> **—Lillian Hellman**

> “Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause –it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.”  
>  
> **—Harold Rosenberg**

> “Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.”  
>  
> **—Sinclair Lewis**

> “Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600\. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.”  
>  
> **—Oliver Stone**