Substack, create 1000 true fans and have them subsidise your lifestyle via a calcified regular stipend.
Yeah nah.
Patreon, ‘please support my creative endeavours with an arbitrary small sum monthly.’
Nope.
Subscription models are viable but lack honour.
There’s no honour in the assumption that your fiscal gratitude remains a robotic constant.
If you lack the time to be grateful but retain the means to set and forget that gratitude, what does that say about the quality of reciprocity you have to lend?
Here’s a donation button, you can donate anytime and any amount and feel genuinely connected at each contribution.
[maybe even get a personal email recognising and thanking you]
Street performance was one of, if not the only vehicle that preserved and maintained an old honour system that predates capitalism.
An audience or a client of an artisan would inspect the piece at its completion and judge its personal worth to them.
That transaction itself, as defined by those that received it, defined the quality of not only the object or experience BUT THE RELATIONSHIP.
In performance you owned your gratitude by reciprocation. You didn’t have to, which made the fact you did a chosen moment.
Oh noes I hear you cry, the artist/artisan risks all. What if the oligarch takes the ornate woodwork and pays a pittance?
Here’s what happens, it’s human nature and politics 101. The aristocrat gets the first object cheaply however the artisan thereafter is pointedly otherwise engaged and the status of the cheapskate withers in the public commons.
Relationships blossom with clients that base their transactions on heartfelt gratitude.
And it worked. It worked in every country I have visited.
The concept of maximising your revenue streams via exploitation of a one time point of purchase carried forward indefinitely is the putrid heart of late stage capitalism laid bare.
Yeah nah.
Apart from commissioned projects my art has always been an invitation to discern and laugh and forget and be intrigued.
If you have disposable income and gratitude it’s my pleasure to accept what’s on offer.
If you are on the bones of your ass and your weight lifts momentarily and I see that then that’s a currency to me.
I’m honoured. It’s an honour system after all.
So here’s a link, no-one’s watching, as Justin Case, who used the truth as his moneyline at the end of his show, would say.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, if you can afford it and you liked my work then contribute towards my next show.
Whatever you do Ladies and Gentlemen.........don’t lie to yourself.”
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