Watching Amanda Palmer giving her enthusiastic TED talk, ‘The Art of Asking’ made me think about this precious relationship between the artist and his or her audience. Amanda has a very unique one, she interacts closely with all of them through Twitter and other social media, ask them anything and they answer, or even crash on their couch: ‘Couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are the same thing. You’re falling into the audience’, as she put it. As anyone knows, this allowed her to establish such a trusting relationship with her fans that she raised more than $1 million with her Kickstarter campaign! Trust seems to be the key word here, this is a woman who lets fans touch and write on her naked body,… she dares it all and she wins. She even encourages piracy and answers to the critics wondering how she made all these people pay for her music: ‘I didn’t make them. I asked them.’
Good for her, she is very successful at it, but I have a problem at her being the model for the relationship between the artist and audience. She is very convincing and a lot of what she does reflects her bold, outgoing personality, but not all artists are ready to do what she does, and does this make them less artists for that reason? In this Internet-communication era, should artists literally offer their naked body to the crowd to establish this relationship because people are craving so much eye contact and body contact?
For Amanda Palmer, it’s always a three-thing-story, the artist, the art and the audience are as close as they can get, but I don't think it is what every artist wants… there is a famous quote from Glenn Gould:
‘The artist should be permitted anonymity, unaware of the presumed demand of the marketplace. They'll make contact on a much more meaningful level.’
Indeed, shouldn’t artists be allowed to have some kind of privacy, anonymity or are these times gone forever? Music, like any form of art, cannot live or even exist without a public, but when did artists begin to give so much, to establish this super close relationship with their public? I don't see the shy and introvert artist survive in these promiscuous conditions.
Sure social media like Twitter have transformed this relationship, and the artist is certainly not anonymous anymore, I bet you actually know too much about your favorite artists, and you get the curious impression you personally know the ones you follow on Twitter because of the fake intimacy this creates.
If anonymity is gone, Amanda Palmer is going even further, she is implying that an artist should be good at the art of asking, but is it the role of the artist to ask? To me, she is redefining and extending her role, not only she erases the image of the artist creating his or her art in solitude in the hope of finding a public, but she thinks the artist also has to ask for money? My guess is that a lot of artists are uncomfortable with that part. There is no doubt that everyone has to eat and art gets harder and harder to sell, however, saying the artist should also be an asker and a seller goes beyond what he or she is in essence.
Everyone is praising Mrs. Palmer’s wonderful TED talk, and I thought she was great too, but she has an assurance, a self-confidence that many artists don’t have. Artists shouldn’t be afraid to ask? At the condition they think their art is valuable, worthwhile, but what about the ones who don’t, not everyone is Jack White! A lot of them doubt of their talent, even John Lennon was partly insecure when he said, ’Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty’.
So I applause Mrs. Palmer for her guts, but it is a sad perspective if the only artists who will survive are the ones who have her bravado.