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Wealthy musician Amanda Palmer, who last year raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to produce and release a record, recently used a TED talk to expand on the idea that artists should be willing to work for free. After relaying a story about how she used to be a street performer, Palmer, who is married to a very successful author named Neil Gaiman, told an audience of people who’d paid $7,500 apiece to be there that musicians shouldn’t “make” people pay for their work, but rather “let” people pay for their work. She also explained that she found it virtuous when a family of undocumented immigrants huddled together on their couch for a night so that she and her band could have their beds, because her music and presence was a fair exchange for the family’s comfort. After about 13 minutes of explaining why she is content with people giving her things, Palmer received a standing ovation.
When People Write for Free, Who Pays?
Okay, look, Amanda Palmer’s music is not to my particular taste, and I think there are many legit criticisms to be made of her ways of doing things (it’s art, right? it’s intended to provoke), but can we just get a couple of things straight?
1. Who she is married to and how much money he personally makes is completely irrelevant to how she conducts her career, and implying otherwise is so appallingly sexist it makes me want to HULK SMASH.
2. Even if it were relevant, they got married after she had already been crowdsourcing her career at a level of success she deemed acceptable for some time (but which hardly seems describable as “lucrative” until very, very recently). She should change because she married someone well off? If she did, wouldn’t the criticism be that she totally sold out by marrying a rich guy? Maybe if we’re critiquing how women run their careers we could leave their marriages out of it, hm?
3. The point of the story about the immigrant family is that the *family* decided it was fair first, that they felt that Palmer’s music had helped their daughter in some significant way and that therefore they had received something of value, and therefore providing Palmer a bed to sleep in was something they could do in return. That is up to THEM to decide, not YOU, and the takeaway from the story is to not deny them the dignity of deciding for themselves what constitutes a fair exchange. They’re impoverished immigrants so they can’t possibly be equipped to invite someone to share their home for a night? Speaking of crappy white attitudes.
4. In fact, that was the unspoken point of the whole thing- she asks for something, and people get to decide for themselves if they have it to give. Surely some of them give it for bad reasons, or stupid reasons, but the point is what they are giving is THEIRS TO GIVE.
5. Yeah, her music isn’t really my thing either, but it’s not up to me, you, or anyone else to shit on someone else’s musical tastes, either. Don’t Yuck someone else’s Yum, okay?
(via tiffanyb)
I was going to write a huge thing about this (on the heels of my Forbes article about Palmer’s TED talk) but Tiffany basically boiled it down to the necessities so I’ll just leave this here and co-sign.
(via tiffanyb)
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Feeling today like telling people I like them, I really like them. I’ll start with the following:
