Nothing But Trouble: Amanda Palmer and the Gift Economy

Over in my column at the Clyde Fitch Report, my piece on the recent Amanda Palmer controversy has reportedly set a record for the most widely read article since the website's relaunch this past summer.

For those of you who are unfamiliar: Amanda Palmer is the musician, songwriter, and performance artist who used to front the Boston-based punk-cabaret, duo The Dresden Dolls. After breaking with her record label over reasons that I don't cover in the article, she decided self-produce, mobilizing her fan-base to crowd-fund her new album, tour and other related projects to the tune of US$1,192,793 (she had only asked for $100,000.)



Though the amount was itself record breaking, the fundraising scheme is not what was at the center of the controversy, websites like Kickstarter have become a means by which arts patronage has been democratized, and simply fulfills the promise that the internet has offered in bridging the gap between the working artist and his or her fans and customers.

What was controversial was Palmer's (since rescinded) request that while on tour with her band, The Grand Theft Orchestra, musicians in selected cities should play in her string and horn sections with only beer, high-fives, hugs, and swag as payment. Depending on to whom she was addressing, she either claimed that this was an experiment, something she was doing for her fans, part of her determining her own way of conducting her business, or simply that she could not afford to pay musicians.

Ultimately, the position one takes on this controversy depends on where one draws the line between the gift-economy and the market economy and whether or not you believe the line needs to be redrawn when one individual has the sort of star power to be simply handed $1.2 million by her fans:

The upshot is that musicians were unpaid when it was convenient and paid when it was seen as necessary, also claiming that when musicians were not being paid, that they were happy with the situation. She further responded to her critics by noting the times she had played for free, or had famous musicians sit in with her and concluding that “YOU HAVE TO LET ARTISTS MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS ABOUT HOW THEY SHARE THEIR TALENT AND TIME” with the implication that there was an equal playing field between an artist who is capable of raising over a million dollars from enthusiastic fans and one who may very well be struggling to make ends meet. The underlying argument was that the market (that is the employer, that is Amanda Palmer) should set the wages and working conditions and everyone should be happy for the opportunity to play with Amanda Palmer no matter their pay-scale. Shockingly, it is the same argument that free-market libertarians make against labor unions and health and safety regulations. It was also quite at odds with her decision to perform Leon Rosselon’s song The World Turned Upside Down at an October 6, 2011, Occupy Boston event.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to know Palmer well, but I traveled in some of the same circles for many years, and even performed in a few of her projects.

Nothing But Trouble: Bread & Puppet Theater's Peter Schumann

Left: 1934 issue of Die Brennessel portrays a Jewish press magnate subverting Germany with a phallic tube of lies
Right: Bread & Puppet iconic avatar of the evils of modernity, Uncle Fatso, with phallic cigar.

In the latest installment of my "Nothing But Trouble" column at the Clyde Fitch Report, I discuss the politics of Bread & Puppet Theater founder, Peter Schumann on the occasion of his receiving Goddard College's Second Annual Presidential Award for Activism. Goddard President Barbara Vacarr, in her speech introducing Schumann, noted:

[...J]ust as individuals do, human societies tend to see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy narratives that, if not challenged, lead to destruction[...]

[...V]isionary artists like Peter Schumann are our sharpest eyes, our keenest ears, our most adept linguists as they see that which has been made invisible or unwelcome, they hear the voices missing from our dominant narratives and they speak in languages that pierce unconsciousness and translate slick sound bites into nuanced and deeper understandings of our world.

Of course, the visionary artist is another myth, and when we start examining the myth of Peter Schumann, we find something that should at least give us pause:

Schumann speaks frequently of being born in 1934 in a region called Silesia, but he neglects to mention that it was part of the Third Reich and that his hometown of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) was a major base of support of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Indeed, the local German population provided a fertile ground for Naziism to take root: in the 1920s, mob violence had already forced much of the city’s Jewish and Polish populations to leave, and, over the course of Schumann’s childhood, the city was rendered Judenfrei through deportations. Breslau was a city surrounded by a network of concentration camps and slave labor camps providing commercial products for the city. Despite the political nature of his art, Schumann never addresses the fact that for the first 11 years of his life, he was a child of Nazi Germany. He never discusses whether or not his parents were party members, whether or not he was a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk (the Hitler Youth subdivision for boys aged 10-14), or how these experiences influenced him. Popular book-length studies of Schumann and Bread & Puppet (like George Dennison’s An Existing Better World: Notes On The Bread & Puppet Theater and Marc Estrin’s essays for Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater) make no mention of Schumann’s life in Nazi-era Silesia.

The question I have been asking since 2007 since I stopped performing with Bread & Puppet has been how much of Schumann's politics are influenced by his childhood in Nazi Germany?

Read the rest in The Clyde Fitch Report!

Nothing But Trouble: Theatre Miscommunications Group?

Graphic by Jai Sen, for the Clyde Fitch Report

In my The Clyde Fitch Report column "Nothing But Trouble" I follow up my commentary on the volunteer situation at last month's Theatre Communications Group conference in Boston. The piece summarizes parts 1 and 2 of my #OccupyTCG series that ran earlier this month before moving on TCG's official (and unofficial) reactions.

Nothing But Trouble: Theatre Miscommunications Group?

Nothing But Trouble: Philistinism in the UK, Part II

Over at the Clyde Fitch Report, part II of my post-mortem on the on the attempt of British anti-Israeli activists to prevent the Israeli State Theatre, Habima, from performing at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London as part of the 37 play Globe to Globe Festival:

Given the Globe’s steadfastness that that it would not bow to any cultural boycott, the March 29th letter was doomed to have little effect; only gaining headlines due to the celebrity status of many of the signatories: film star Emma Thompson’s name appeared in much of the subsequent news coverage, as did that of Mark Rylance, who was former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. It was little surprise to see the name of playwright Caryl Churchill, whose Seven Jewish Children has been widely criticized as anti-Semitic by such figures as Booker Award winning novelist, Howard Jacobson, attorney and literary scholar Anthony Julius and others due to its invocation of the blood libel, gross distortion of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and crude ethnic stereotypes of Jews. (Notably, The Guardian, which makes Seven Jewish Children available on its website has published numerous apologiae effectively making the paper the play’s corporate sponsor.)

With the March 29th letter, the story had gone from activists attempting to silence artists not because of the content of the work but for their identity, to that of artists attempting to silence other artists due to their identity: a particularly dangerous position for artists to take. Once an artist advocates the boycotting of another artist’s work because of their nation of origin or for taking a gig in a specific theatre, they have both given sanction to hooliganism seen on May 28th and 29th and sanction similar retaliation towards their own work.

Read more at the Clyde Fitch Report!