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?

Audience Approval

Tom Bartlett, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, has an amusing post on who gets a standing ovation  for a TED talk. Applause, when you think about it, is pretty bizarre, no? Clapping our hands together vigorously to indicate approval? Standing, while clapping our hands together, to show super approval?

It's no weirder, I suppose, than rock concert audience members holding up cigarette lighters during a power ballad (for young people that currently use a cell phone: sorry, it's not the same--no flicker). We no longer yell "huzzah!" but we do still cry, "bravo!" and, in other venues, "woooooh!" Today, we "like" messages by clicking a symbol on a keyboard, but that's really no match for the forceful and sustained physicality ("thunderous applause", etc.) of audience approval in the 19th century.

There is a BBC radio piece on the history of applause, which is useful. Otherwise, Alex Ross, of the New Yorker, has dug up fascinating details about the increasingly limited role of spontaneous applause at classical music concerts. London's The Musical Times of July 1, 1897 (pp. 448-449) offers some insights, as well, particularly regarding changes in the relationship between applause and gender:

Thirty years ago it was hardly "good form" for a lady to applaud. She allowed her brothers or sons of husband to express her approval vicariously. But emancipation and the athletic education of our Amazons have changed all that. In applause nowadays, as in everything else, dux femina facti, and when a Paderewski plays lovely woman does not merely clap her lily-white hands, but she stamps her fairy feet and thumps on the floor with her elegant parasol or en-tout-cas. And certainly musicians are not likely to resent the innovation, for they would scout as a counsel of perfection the maxim that "virtuosity is its own reward." No; it may be a sign of weakness, but musicians, when they perform in public, like to be applauded, and as fully three-fourths of the tribe of conert-goers are of the fair sex, it is just as well, in the interest of the performer, that women should have abandoned their old prejudice against testifying their approval in the way practised by the mere male person.

I need more, though. Has anyone done a serious scholarly history of applause? If women and men, or refined and non-refined persons, were expected to show appreciation differently at concerts in the past, were fans and non-fans doing the same? How exactly? How do we vary our approval in today's digital age?