We are the democratic patron of those arts deemed commercial—our votes are cast in plastic swipes and PayPal clicks. Why, then, are we so often dissatisfied with those fancies by our favors fashioned?
It doesn’t have to be this way. The 21st century has granted us technologies capable of freeing us from corporate mediation–even as our lives become more and more mediated by those selfsame technologies. So, while we now have commercials on Youtube and targeted advertisement on Facebook, we also have places like Kickstarter, helping independent ventures get off the ground by connecting creative entrepreneurs directly with the people most enthusiastic about their success: you and me.
But before we can get there, we must pick our way back–way back–through the historical relationship that has always existed, sometimes regrettably, sometimes gratefully, between artists and their economy.
Let me put it another way: Any writer you’ve heard of is bound to be a sell-out. Open up the book review—if your paper still has one—and you’ll find a coven of J.K. Rowlings. A cabal of Stephen Kings. A blasphemy of Dan Browns, an orgy of Stephanie Meyers, a litigation of John Grishams, and a scattering of Cormac McCarthys to legitimize the business. They have to be. Either they sell millions of copies, or they might as well not exist.
They can’t help it. Writers, like spirits that fade to dust as soon as they’re forgotten, are only writers when they are being read. Otherwise, they’re no better than hobbyists. I know adults who, educational curricula aside, haven’t cracked a single book outside of the Twilight “saga” in the past half-decade. Their numbers dwarf the adults I know who still consider reading a pleasure, and who bother to scratch below the bestseller lists.
But are the readers really to blame? We’ve been fed up on pulp and crap, Pavlov’d to believe that sitting patiently through over 500 hours of television advertisements per year is time well spent. We can’t read what isn’t published, and we will read only a small percentage of what is—chiefly because, unless you’re following the career of a favorite author, the space beyond that Bestsellers rack gives way quickly to unnavigable void. Every Borders bookstore nationwide either has closed or will soon be closing its doors, permanently. As much of a McBookstore as it could sometimes be, some cities had no other options (independent bookstores either having been choked off by chains or never having existed in the first place) and will soon have no option whatsoever. Our public libraries—which survive, increasingly, on private patronage—have never been more in peril. We may soon find the bookshelf obsolete. Browsing is a dying art.
Growing up near the coast, I never got to experience the awe of seeing the ocean for the first time. By the time I knew what it was, it had always been there. That experience…I think it’s left the menu for good. My generation, and the generations to follow, will never get to see those kinds of horizons with fresh eyes; they’re only a plane trip away, and television and movies have already shown us all there is and more. We’ve been robbed.
Our grandchildren might one day experience that same awe upon visiting their university or federal library and seeing those rows of physical books lined up for the browsing. I take little consolation in that. They’ll be incapacitated by choice. Or are libraries already on their way to becoming an app?
Let’s change the subject. Let’s change something. Let’s talk about patronage. Some patrons are pecuniary. When most of us think of patronage—if we devote any thought to such a seemingly outmoded system—we paint some romantic portrait of a Renaissance artist under commission by a nobleman wishing to alchemize his wealth into legacy.
But patrons are also conceptual, in both a straightforward and less straightforward way. Patrons don’t just say “Here’s some money; paint me something pretty” (those would be dads). Neal Stephenson, in volume 1 of his three-volume, 3000 page historical/science fiction “Baroque Cycle”, describes a scene in which the emergent Royal Society, operating under the patronage of John Comstock, abruptly cease all ongoing experiments in order to fulfill a request from Comstock’s patron (and, by order of hierarchy, all of England’s): “His Majesty had noticed that ant eggs were bigger than ants, and demanded to know how that was possible.” Patrons make things—art, discovery—possible, but in the end they also shape those possibilities in their own image.
Likewise, we have patrons that are purely conceptual, that offer no material support in the making of something but are nonetheless an element of its making. They’re all around us—books, movies, television, and the various other worlds in which we steep long enough each day for their flavors to influence us. In both cases, it pays to be transparent about our sources—those individuals who keep their sponsors hidden tend not to keep them for very long.
So, for example, I may never have started thinking about patronage had I not recently cracked the seal on Quicksilver, Stephenson’s aforementioned novel, set in 17th century England at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. It’s easy to think of patronage only in terms of the Michelangelo and the Medici, but natural philosophy was no less governed by the whims (and purses) of nobles; it’s clear that the great thinkers of the Royal Society would have been doing a lot of daydreaming were it not for their wealthy and politically powerful connections.
By some weird harmonic resonance, these kinds of situations keep turning up in my imaginary life, invisible though they seem to be in my real one. Mason & Dixon, An Instance of the Fingerpost…. While I wouldn’t point to it as a pioneer of interactive storytelling, I’ve been enjoying Assassin’s Creed II, which can best be described as The Da Vinci Code with extra da Vinci. However, Leonardo’s flamboyant enthusiasm for cryptanalysis and man-powered flight can’t compare with the weird authenticity of playing the role of an assassin who receives commissions from patron among patrons Lorenzo de’ Medici—what one writer calls a “Medici Assassin.”
There’s something hopelessly romantic about all this. True, we still have grants, federal and private, in nearly all fields of art and science. The recipients of grants still need to expend some effort to keep their sponsors happy. But there’s no romance in that. It’s nothing like the jeopardous underdoggedness you imagine Boyle must have felt when he wanted to cut up a dog for science, or da Vinci to put a man in the air.
What’s really changed? Only our entire economic and political structure. When the wealth and power were in the hands of the few, even the economy and politics reflected the ideals of the most powerful patrons—the Medici are the perfect example of this phenomenon. We still have a few people—or corporations or interest groups—with a controlling interest in the cultural wealth of our nation. We also, as voters and stockholders, have some degree of control over the allocation of grants. However, if you tune the microscope closer, you’ll see that there are a few Big Daddy patrons with their hands down everybody’s shorts, making us all feel a little dirty. Their names are Consumerism and Democracy, though they may as well be Legion.
How much sway do we really hold over the arts we patronize? Between Borders and Penguin, Amazon and Random House, our votes are mediated at both ends by forces whose eyes, when reading a literary masterpiece or a piece of illiterate mush, will always be distracted by the twinkle of gold on the horizon. They decide what we can spend our money on, and what happens to that money once we spend it. We then fall into the same cycle that has poisoned the fast food industry: our teeth grow soft on digestible, saccharine fare, requiring every meal to be sweeter and more finely chopped than the last, until we’re stuck drinking sugary mush and wondering where all the carrots have gone.
So we begin to look for an alternative. Outside of creating our own insular system of commerce–which I believe ignores the very real, sometimes grim economic situation of many artists, commercial or no, who deserve compensation for the important work they do–our only choice is to rewire the system, bypassing the middlemen who decide what we can make and want made, trying to learn to make those decisions for ourselves.
Donating to a Kickstarter campaign, as many of you already know, is a bit like buying stock in creativity. My first experience with Kickstarter was with Andrew Plotkin’s Hadean Lands project, which had well exceeded its goal by the time I got on board. However, Kickstarter offers enticements for various levels of donations—by pledging $25 or more, I secured myself a “rune-inscribed CD” of the game (the only way to obtain a PC-compatible version of the iOS exclusive); higher-tier backers will have their names integrated into the game as Heroes of the Calcination/Dissolution/Coagulation, while the most coveted prize sees Plotkin flying out to bake cookies and discuss stuff. If Plotkin hadn’t been able to raise enough money to get his enterprise off the ground—a non-issue in this case—I wouldn’t have been charged a cent; backers are only billed once the goal has been met. And, like a real investor, I’ve been receiving monthly updates on the project, so I get to see exactly how my money is being spent (mostly on noodles, as it turns out).
Kickstarter makes it frighteningly easy to want to spend money. Each campaign is attractively laid out, with a video describing the project and clear descriptions of the project’s goal, projected business plan, and what each level of donation will net you. There’s something slightly suspicious about the machine-pressed design of the individual pages, and the segregation of pages “curated” by places like YouTube and Sundance, but I try to push it to the back of my mind. Finding projects is also easy: click on the word “discover” in the top tab, and you’re immediately shown a slew of projects, broken down into categories such as “New and Noteworthy,” “Popular This Week,” and “Recently Successful.” This is my first time really browsing the site, so it’s hard to tell how deep the rabbit hole really goes (another reason why the e-reader browsing experience will never replace the bookshelf). Sidebars make it easy to search by city or category, as well as to find small projects or projects that will soon expire. You don’t have to dig deep to find something enticing; at the time of this writing, I’m browsing through a cross-cultural puppeteering project that will tour Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma; a short film starring plastic army men and living cicadas; and an anthology comic book featuring work exclusively by women. The front page of the site also has a Project of the Day: in this case, Les Figues Press’s I’ll Drown My Book, a collection of conceptual writing by women such as Kathy Acker and Renee Gladman which has recently met its goal (congratulations!). Were I to pledge the minimum in each of these projects to net myself a copy (or a handmade sock-puppet in one case), I would be out $115–and I’ve barely left the front page.
The front page also shows me Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities, an art book/DVD that I can practically guarantee would never appear on the front table at Borders. It’s a bit of a coincidence, because my name is listed on the table of contents, alongside fellow CalArts Writing MFA Denise Li, whose contribution, as I’ve said elsewhere, is one of the most hyper-charged, profound, confusing, and hilarious things I have ever encountered—a bit like sex itself. Unlike I’ll Drown My Book, Strange Attractors still has some distance to cover toward its goal–$5000 in the next 25 days. Will they make it? That depends on how many people besides myself find the following description enticing: “this project has gone beyond male and female, beyond queer, beyond any notion of gender, beyond the anthropomorphic to erotic possibilities as vastly varied as the universe itself.”
Of course, Kickstarter isn’t the only corner of the web connecting artists directly with their audience. I was recently published by another one of them. Word Busker: newer, smaller, and generally poorer-known than Kickstarter, but no less inspired. The motto of this literary e-zine (which specializes in <500-word microfiction) is one I think we can all agree with: “sentimentality can only survive on ramen noodles for so long.” Their approach to that problem seems so simple you have to wonder why everybody else isn’t doing it: rather than pay the author a fixed royalty for publication, the reader is encouraged to donate, via PayPal, an amount they consider proportionate to the worth of the story. The donation is then passed on directly to the author. This has increasingly been the model in other kinds of independent art communities, but this is the first time I’ve seen it applied to literature. I have a feeling that, once they’ve caught the attention they deserve, Word Busker will be a Big Thing.
The Word Busker model might not seem so revolutionary at first glance. In a traditional publishing model, the readers give money to the publishers, and the publishers give money to the writers; the writers are still getting paid, so what’s the big deal? For one thing, it’s not that simple: technically, the readers give money to the booksellers, who order from the distributors, who then send a check to the publishers. And then there’s the fact that the writers (and the printers and artists etc.) have (hopefully) already been paid by the time the book hits shelves. What this means for magazines particularly is that, even if the reader’s money can be said to make its way eventually to the authors, it’s getting invested in the next issue’s batch of authors. If you bought 15 copies of Black Clock 11 because you love Chris Abani, that’s great and we love you forever, but you can’t count yourself as one of Chris Abani’s patrons (and I’m not sure he’d want you to).
Of course, this isn’t really a problem if all you love is Black Clock (or BOMB or Harper’s or what have you). But there are times when one piece particularly moves you, or you want to help cultivate an emerging talent, and it’s nice to be able to intervene directly. Word Busker is for those times. It also quite handily does away with any concept of a “shelf life”—a chimera in the world of online publishing to begin with. If you stumble across one of these stories for the first time 12 years from now, you can still reward the author for the very current pleasures induced by their past efforts. You’ll just have to cross your fingers that PayPal hasn’t folded by then.
What’s next? We already have novels written by delegation. The time may come when I can say “Write me a book about an unbound lagomorphologist hitchhiking his way up the Mississippi Delta,” toss a fiver with a patrician flourish at the screen, and the internet will write it for me. I am my own Medici. Magical.
by Byron Alexander Campbell
an Associate Editor of Black Clock preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity
