Fans, Artists, Love, and Exchange

Punk has always challenged traditional models of artist-audience interaction, from DIY culture to the contradictions of the record industry selling rebellion against the record industry (for more on the latter, watch The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, then read Mary Harron's "McRock: Pop as a Commodity" in Facing the Music: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, ed. by Simon Frith). The latest wrinkle in this thread of punk history is Amanda Palmer's innovative use of online culture, including Twitter and Kickstarter, to bypass the record industry and to ask fans directly to support her artistry. She explains her approach in a recent TED Talk, "The Art of Asking," which just went up online:

TED Talks are always a little awkward (I remember someone once tweeting that they are occasions "where business people and academics pretend to like one another" - who was that?), but this talk seemed awkward in a somewhat useful way, introducing the typically staid TED audience to the glories of edgy performance art and cabaret-punk. It has not been without controversy--last year, Palmer ran into some public criticism of her essentially anarchist business model in terms of paying guest musicians, and how she addresses this controversy in the TED talk has been a matter of further discussion in the blogosphere.

I am more interested, though, in what all this says about fandom and its place in the sales and marketing of music in the digital age. Are fans rebels or ultra consumers? What are the right and wrong ways to recognize their devotion? Who, if anyone, should own crowd-sourced work? How might such questions help us to rethink (or rediscover) the participatory nature of arts? There is a lot of thinking out there about these questions, of course, from Liza Potts' investigations of Palmer's fan base to Henry Jenkins' wide-ranging work on new media distribution to Lewis Hyde's thinking about gift culture and the commons. Looks like a good new undergraduate seminar, no?

Chuck Fans

Great post over at the Monkey See blog today by Linda Holmes on the ways that "Chuck" fans challenged the usual assumptions about producer-audience relationships in television. As she writes, "It's a common internet truism that if you're not paying for ad-supported media, you're not the customer — you, as an eyeball to be advertised to, are the product. It's most commonly said about services like Facebook, but it's just as true of ad-supported television. And Chuck fans, in their businesslike enthusiasm, sold themselves as a product." Specifically, to Subway:

Frankfurt School-inspired critiques of fandom sometimes depend on rather narrow notions of producer hegemony: the "culture industry" manipulates; consumers are directly duped or resistant. The case of "Chuck," as Holmes points out, offers a slightly different understanding of who is negotiating with whom and why. It reminds me, actually, of examples of fans embracing alleged manipulative frameworks of exchange and taking perverse pleasure in that "complicity"--from the willingly humbugged visitors to Barnum's Museum in the 1840s to the self-loathing/loving of Sex Pistols fans. (For more on this sort of complexity, see what remains, in my view, one of the best pieces of writing on the topic, Mary Harron's "McRock: Pop as Commodity," in Simon Frith, ed., Facing the Music, 1988).

At any rate, the pop pleasures of "Chuck" end tonight. But pop pleasure will endure.