A Dream Unequivocally Denied
“We all know that dreaming is free, but converting fantasies into reality can be pretty expensive and that's where a new Web site, kickstarter.com can help.”
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112506250 & http://www.kickstarter.com/start)
Kickstarter's next denial response wasn't nearly as kind as their first (graphic follows.)
That Kickstarter used my phrase "keep it goin'" indicates that someone read my proposal somewhat thoroughly. I must admit: I am, at once, impressed and amused by this. What immediately follows insults me: the implication that I'm using Kickstarter as a means for funding a, to use their term, "fund my life" project.
Two questions immediately spring to mind:
- Might Kickstarter suspect that I'm going to put my new computer to non-creative uses, such as balancing our checkbook, or filling out job applications?
- Does anyone think that Zach Braff isn't going to use part of his $3.3 Million Kickstarter haul for hair gel? Might anyone suspect that Zach Braff sought donations in order to avoid dipping into his own personal wealth/retirement (after all, he hasn't worked in a while, it seems)? I'll address this question in greater depth later; for now, I'll depart from it by stating that Zach Braff might use part of the proceeds to purchase sandwiches for his film crew. That's a nice thing for him to do, but does such a purchase violate Kickstarter's guidelines?
I seem to recall Kickstarter stating that once the funds are acquired, theirs is a hands-off policy. The beneficiary is free to spend the money as he sees fits, and Kickstarter has no role in determining the direction of the final product. If I find the passage specifically, I'll cite it. Until then, you'll have to take my word for it. At any rate, that policy introduces another question: So what if I use the computer to balance my checkbook and apply for jobs? Isn't that all but implied? Also, is Kickstarter asking Zach Braff how he allocated his monies? Money in hand, are they telling him, "Mr. Braff, we see that you've spent inordinate amounts of money not consistent with our guidelines, if the line item 'Grooming' is an indicator?" According to their policy, no.
At any rate, my dalliance with Kickstarter was finished. They didn't like me and I like them less. They don't have the time to trifle with SPF One Million's $50. I, on the other hand, have nothing but time right now, and I want to keep my campaign going.
The problem is, Kickstarter leads on struggling artists, having them believe that they're welcomed with open arms. Indeed, the folks at Kickstarter fancy themselves as torch-bearers of the noble tradition of cultural patronage:
As an enticement, you, the artist, is invited by Kickstarter to join such august company. You might call the enticement a reward.
"When Did "Independent" Become "Indie?"
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/movies/08kickstarter.html?_r=0)
A lot of space, perhaps too much, devoted to "indie" and "D. I. Y." culture is in order, as well as a caveat: cultural criticism is murky business by its nature. So many people, whose credentials vary from "self-styled" to "PhD," comment on culture, for one, and for another, an entire language was created expressly for the task of cultural commentary because plain English won't do and in an effort to keep the barbarians at bay. Inevitably, questions along the lines of what is "is" arise, burning questions such as, "When did 'independent' become 'indie?'"
Murky business for sure, and damn near intolerable, yet necessary. Here, I'll admit to a fondness and strong preference for plain English. Plain English, for one, is malleable, and ripe for manipulation. A phrase, commonly credited to Frank Zappa, to describe music discourse, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," illustrates beautifully the expressive power of simple, everyday English, and Zappa was no dummy, even if he had no truck with Derrida and his brethren (which is what my gut tells me.) If you revel in the joys of plain English arranged artfully, you're probably suspicious of the business of cultural criticism, the entire school of thought that sprung from it, and the language created for the purpose.
If you endured four years of college, you likely have a working knowledge of this language, or can at least identify it. It's not important to possess a thorough understanding of cultural critical theory (I'm going to demonstrate my lack of mastery in the following section), but it is important to place the terms in context to understand their purposes. Kickstarter, like the rest of corporate America, understands the usefulness of these critical terms. They understand that for almost anyone with a bachelor's degree, the words themselves have an exotic allure.
It's almost like this: say that you love food. You've always wanted to try Indian food, but you haven't. Maybe you've smelled Indian food, but weren't willing to take the leap to putting it in your mouth because the aromas weren't familiar; besides, a lot of Indian dishes have peas, which many people refuse to eat. You read food blogs because, for one, you revel in the joys of plain English arranged artfully and because you love food. You've read that other food lovers love Indian food, so much that they can't get enough of the stuff. Saag paneer? The blogger luxuriates on its merits to the point at which you might begin to think, "Maybe spiced cream spinach with hardened cubes of cottage cheese isn't so bad." If you're particularly curious, you'll read about samosas, too. That you can get a handle on - no irksome consecutive vowels in "samosa," and they're fried. You'll have one samosa. What's chutney?
Corporate America, of which Kickstarter is a part, understands this sort of legerdemain very well.
Hegemony, Control of the Narrative, and Their Applications in Plain English
Basically, the terms "indie" and "D. I. Y." exist in hegemony (basically, and God willing, briefly, a power struggle between two factions. The victor "controls the narrative," or defines the terms), between artists who truly used to do it themselves, with little, if any, hope for a benefactor, and corporate interests and media, dutifully falling in line, that have vitiated the terms such as to render them all but meaningless, save for their marketing cache. Currently, corporate interests and media define the terms in question.
Maybe it is time for truly independent artists to jettison those now meaningless terms and replace them with more suitable ones in an effort to distinguish themselves; then again, maybe that doesn't matter. Truly independent artists have never had much say in their own narrative until well after the fact. Their concerns were more fundamental, like choosing between art and starvation. Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, while, perhaps, not definitive, serves as the most well-known chronicle of the 80's underground, and provides not only good definitions for "indie" and "D. I. Y," but also plenty of examples to demonstrate that "indie" was, at least one time, not synonymous with "glamourous." But don't take my word for it (I wasn't quite there yet): Click To Look Inside.
One thing's certain: few so-called "indie artists," according to the contemporary definition, have to choose between guitar strings or a trip to Taco Bell, and none of them have the stomach to play through a vicious bout of diarrhea like Mike Watt did when The Minutemen toured as support for REM in 1985 (Azzerad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, From Memory: I No Longer Have the Book). Now, they don't have to. Many venues offer food, if the artist can't already afford to go out, and if an indie artist like Zach Braff gets diarrhea, he can call in sick. Even when he's not playing, he's still getting paid.
After all that verbiage, we can all agree on this: English doesn't get any plainer than diarrhea, and none of us like it. That includes Kickstarter.
Laurel: Public Face of Kickstarter. Indicator of a Shifting Paradigm.
Upon attempting to "locate" the etymology for the term "paradigm," I was met with a barrage of disagreeable English. I suspected that the term found vogue in academia, and was plucked from that ghetto by corporate America, who then conscripted it for its uses. What I do know is that corporate America adores the term more than I do, and uses it at every opportunity.
The graphic above illustrates that CNN thinks that Kickstarter marks a shift in the paradigm, presumably that of funding art. To my way of thinking, a shift in the art itself should follow if Kickstarter is funding the sort of projects it purports to.
Over the course of my campaign, I've seen plenty of Laurel. Laurel's created a successful campaign to help fund a "memoir [not a book - lacks elegance, too plain] about her late father." You can read about her successful campaign here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/laurelholland/spindrift-the-memoir-of-a-climbers-daughter
Two details about her campaign beg mentioning. First, Laurel sought $8000; 217 benefactors chipped in that amount plus $3,415 more, or 43% more than the original amount she asked for. Kickstarter gets a 5% cut from all successful campaigns. Their cut from Laurel comes to $570.75. I'll grant this: that's far less than if she'd asked the bank for a loan. For the sake of argument, I'll assume she has perfect credentials: if she sought funding "the old-fashioned way," the bank would have received a 9% cut (I checked.) Five percent doesn't seem so Draconian. Of course, the bank wouldn't have asked her to produce rewards, and the bank wouldn't ask questions money in hand, either. Zach Braff could have walked into a bank (I'm assuming that his credentials are impeccable, except maybe work. What's the last thing you've seen him in?), but he elected to seek funding through Kickstarter. I'm not done with him yet.
Second, Laurel's "Funding period" ended on July 12, 2012; surely by now, she received all $11,415 less 5% (let's say she has.) Her campaign completed just over a year ago now, her likeness graces Kickstarter's home page. It seemed like I saw her more often than I did Jack, Melissa, or Michael. My curiosity inspired the following experiment: I performed twenty separate Google searches using the query "kickstarter" (twenty searches seemed to serve as a representative sample.) Sure enough, the link to Kickstarter's home page appears first. I accessed Kickstarter's home page after each fresh search. The results of my experiment follow:
- Laurel: Appeared on six different instances.
- Melissa: Appeared on four different instances.
- Jack: Appeared on six different instances.
- Michael: Appeared on four different instances.
My only real surprise was Jack's showing. Otherwise, the result is clear: Laurel vies as the ideal candidate for Kickstarter's Public Face. That's not to knock the other candidates. The bespectacled, baseball cap wearing novelist Jack vies strongly; Michael, whose resemblance to the no-account Jeffrey Lebowski will leave you speechless, is still not quite a slouch, if maybe too "hippie-like," and Melissa stares vacantly into space like you'd expect a self-proclaimed conceptual artist to do. In short, strong showings from each, but Laurel makes the strongest impression. Incidentally, all of the candidates, save for Michael, who hails from Waltham, Massachusetts, claim New York City as their hometown. Laurel and Melissa name Brooklyn specifically. Zach Braff, the recipient of over $3.3 Million, has not appeared on Kickstarter's home page.
With Laurel, all the signifiers of the new indie paradigm fall firmly and nicely into place. Laurel, set amidst an urban tableau of cool yet familiar images such as stairs and pipes and graffiti notably odd due to its legibility, is a fair-skinned indie maiden living in Brooklyn with a memoir on the way. She faces away from the camera, certainly demurely and perhaps even contemplatively, and wears a scarf. Laurel's the next best thing to Zooey Deschanel, maybe better because she probably agreed that Kickstarter could use her likeness for its own purposes (that way, Kickstarter doesn't have to compensate her.)
Kickstarter's home page itself, regardless of who happens to pop up on it, is a coup of indie-design smarts itself. Its design scheme, a coup of color and san-serif fonts, could serve as inspiration for the new Asian fusion bistro slated to open later this year. The Kickstarter logo simply winks at you and says, "Hey, over here - we're fun and approachable, and a lot cooler than your mom and dad." The logo itself could serve as inspiration for the packaging for a new line of gourmet marshmallows.
To borrow the ergot from the new indie/hipster paradigm, Kickstarter has cred. The approbation of heavy-hitters such as CNN, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, to name a few, doesn't hurt, either. If you have your indie signifiers all lined up and an idea you're dreaming to bring to fruition, then why shouldn't you start your own campaign? Under this new paradigm, asking mom and dad or a bank for a loan, or working consecutive double shifts at Papa John's to finance the production, pressing, and promotion of 1000 copies of "Cantus About My Memories of Zooey Deschanel" is for squares.
Where's the Shift?
By all appearances, Kickstarter is where the cool kids hang out, and if your Dionysian impulses are screaming to run riot but you're late on the rent again, you might be thinking that it's not only cooler in their cool blue pool, but also a lifeline. If so, take a dip, or go soak your head.
No one can maintain a state of permanent sensory derangement and get out unscathed, and here, I urge you to consider all this new paradigm business with your cool, Apollonian head. To start, when corporate America or media outlets proclaim that a paradigm shift is underway, and that a business' (e.g) practices best emblematize that shift, you should approach that business with caution. Kickstarter is such a business.
For one, Kickstarter boasts that it is simply the latest (and current best) iteration in the grand tradition of noblesse oblige. That bit about "Mozart, Beethoven, Whitman, Twain, and other artists?" That would signal a return to old practices, and those practices were subject to the caprice of the wealthy. Nice if you could get it, sure, but let's just say that the wealthy didn't answer every knock on their doors. Also, never mind that noblesse oblige might not really exist anymore. Here, a broadside: many members of the wealthy class use every trick to avoid paying taxes, which is the least of their societal obligations, and even the wealthiest tax cheat gets to enjoy the benefits of society.
I guess someone's got to deliver the tax cheat's pizzas. Maybe the delivery guy's working a double to finance an album. Maybe the tax cheat will tip the pizza boy handsomely. Maybe the pizza boy should pitch his idea to the tax cheat; that is, if the pizza boy's a square.
Funny enough, consumers' attitudes concerning the acquisition of art are similar. Their attitudes constitute, in part, the new paradigm concerning art's acquisition: consumers expect something for nothing. Artists who profited under the old paradigm can proceed more or less in the manner to which they'd grown accustomed because they've established enough cache, either with consumers, the industry, or both. Most artists operating under the new paradigm should do so with the understanding that they'll receive little more than "hugs and beers" as compensation for all their hard word. Kickstarter addresses this shift thus: balloon rides, aka rewards (see Part 2). Each creator is expected to create rewards in an effort to entice potential donors (and by rewards, we're not talking coffee cups), which, to me, seems like more work piled atop the project proper. For better or worse, Kickstarter sussed out that part of the new paradigm.
I'd argue worse, of course: under the new paradigm, consumers expect us to operate under the old independent artist paradigm so that they can enjoy the benefits under the new paradigm. Effectively, consumers tell artists, "If you want me to listen to your stuff, you're going to have to work consecutive double shifts at Papa John's, and don't keep me waiting." Ian Mackaye, a music veteran of unimpeachable credentials and the true exemplar of the old independent artist paradigm, addresses this shift in plain English: "[P]eople should be prepared to have fun with the past because the only music that can possibly be free is the music that's from the past. It costs money to make music. And if people are prepared to only have the past to listen to, then let it be free." In response to Mr. Mackaye well-pointed declamation, Kickstarter might respond, "And that's where Kickstarter comes in."
If, as Kickstarter might have you believe, Kickstarter is the answer, then I'm trading in my broken computer and my other music equipment for the gaudiest pair of golf slacks you can imagine. Ask yourself: In Kickstarter's five years of existence, has the artistic landscape changed? Again, it seems to make sense that if, instead of corporations, ordinary folks such as you and me are digging deep to provide funding, then the consequent art should reflect that. I don't see or hear much art that I'd be willing to fund, at least any that's broached mass consciousness. I'll leave you to answer the question, "Where's the shift?" Rolling Stone says, "Kickstarter funds the future." Maybe, if you read Rolling Stone religiously.
And let's face it: Kickstarter, the fact that it allows a few small fries through the velvet rope and a design scheme that serves as inspiration for the living rooms of our social betters notwithstanding, didn't dispense with all of the practices under the old paradigm wholesale. They threw out some of the nasty beige bath water, but they kept the baby with the good head for business. To wit: What Is Kickstarter? Scroll to the bottom. If you're not inclined, I'll save you the time. Under the heading Our mission is to help bring creative projects to life, you would find, "We’re a for-profit company based in New York City’s ["New York: Where All Worthwhile Art Gets Made"] Lower East Side. We spend our time making Kickstarter a little bit better every day, answering questions from backers and creators, and finding new projects to share. If a project is successfully funded, we apply a 5% fee to the funds collected." Consistent with the practices of an ages-old model, Kickstarter gets down to business a couple of layers deep, and once you've managed to get through them, you still have to go to the bottom. Business on the bottom is business as usual.
"What is Kickstarter?" is fair game. Is it a vehicle for "grassroots funding of the arts?" Yeah, and I'm Mr. Peanut in his top hat partying in a hot air balloon. Is it a business? Indubitably, albeit one that pretends that not to really be one, at least as you know it (I imagine a sign that hangs above the entrance of Kickstarter headquarters: "Leave your tie at the door."). Is it "[p]aradigm-shifting?" Does CNN, decent source for current events that it is, truly know much about culture? It doesn't appear that way, but I will accept its claim in part, if, by "paradigm-shifting," they mean that the shift more greatly favors the Z-List celebrity rather than the A-List celebrity now.
As it turns out, Amanda "Fucking" Palmer-Gaiman (wife of author Neil Gaiman), Whoopi Goldberg, and Zach Braff, none of whom you'd heard much from until they mounted their own campaigns, still have enough cache that ordinary people like you and me, people whose comparative wealth is negligible, will fund their projects, seemingly because they just had the gall to ask. Consistent with their policies of funding only "creative projects" and not asking questions once these no-counts, whose collective resume consists, in part, of The Dresden Dolls, The Color Purple, Ghost, Hollywood Squares, "Roman Polanski wasn't guilty of 'rape-rape,'" Garden State, and Scrubs, get their greedy grip around their money, Kickstarter first looked the other way, and then mounted several of their own backpedaling campaigns. Their campaigns must have been successful enough: they kept the money, and artists, struggling and otherwise washed up, are still lining up for their share.
For a company that cherishes "transparency" (Kickstarter uses that term quite a bit, too, and always with regard to creators), it seems that Kickstarter has problems of its own. No matter. They have their money, and there's more on the way.
I can distill all of that verbiage, plain and academic, pithily: Attractive public face notwithstanding, Kickstarter is mostly business as usual.
Perhaps this is the true question: That's the shift? I'll leave you with that.
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