Art that's Worthless Until It's Given Away

Discussing stewardship and precarity with Amanda McLoughlin

Last week, Amanda McLoughlin and I had the first part of our conversation on creating art and setting prices for it. Our conversation this month is sparked by Ted Gioia’s essay from Image, “Gratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art is Free?” Gioia’s essay draws on The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which I’ve also been citing at Other Feminisms, as we discuss why “Gift-Work Becomes Women's Work.”

Leah: When you come up with a fun creative idea, how do you decide whether to put a price tag on it? For my husband’s and my recent Back Again from the Broken Land kickstarter, it was an easier choice—we needed money to be able to release the game as a printed zine. Offering it for sale lets us change it from a pdf to a physical product which we can afford to mail to people. And it let us pay artists and other game designers to contribute (and even give them a pay boost when we got more backers than we anticipated). Kickstarter is built around the idea of letting enthusiasm bring things to the market that you can’t afford to float the fixed costs of yourself. 

But even that feels very different than taking an artistic project and making it my job. Our game isn’t what covers our rent. I’m not worried about our exact profit margin, as long as there’s a cushion to cover our costs. We were comfortable breaking even and just getting to share the game. 

I’ve liked being a freelance writer on the side of a “real” job more than being a full time writer, because it leaves me more freedom to pick the projects I like best, rather than hit a quota. You’re full of creative ideas—how do you think through which ones are a core part of how you support yourself and which are “fun?” Or is that the wrong way to frame it?

Amanda: Being clear on the purpose of the project is the best way to avoid confusion and disappointment. At Multitude we have a saying: “We can make it to make it.” If we want to see something exist in the world, and we have the resources to create it, that’s reason enough. But if it’s important to make enough money on a project—to compensate the team, to make it self-sustaining, whatever the reason—then commercial viability must be a part of the decision-making process. 

We have the freedom to make decisions like that because we do a lot of other things to pay the bills. I sell ads for the members of the Multitude collective along with a number of clients, and the commission on those ads comprises most of our business’s revenue. That covers rent and salaries for my two full-time employees but doesn’t take up all of our time, leaving us with the ability to work on projects that either have to build up to profitability or fall under the category of “make it to make it.” 

We produced a ten-episode podcast sitcom last year called NEXT STOP for two reasons: because we wanted it to exist, and because we wanted to document the process of creating and fairly compensating the team behind a scripted fiction show. We funded that using an advance from Patreon, and have been paying that back monthly. This year, we launched a show in partnership with Nichole Perkins called This is Good for You. Nichole owns the show, we fronted the production costs, and we share in the show’s profits with her. I could afford to enter a long-term partnership under this model because our overhead is covered in other ways, allowing us to give the show time to find its audience and build to profitability. 

Leah: I like how you have more stable, money-focused projects helping to float the more creative or more speculative projects. It’s interesting how it’s not the projects that feel the most exciting that necessarily do the work of financially sustaining the whole. I’ve had Durable Trades on my to-read list in part as a way of exploring this question for myself.

And for a final question: so much of gig work (creative or otherwise) is marked by an unpleasant precarity. Variable hours, variable pay, etc. make it hard to make long-term plans or commitments. But Lewis Hyde sees the possibility of a more positive precarity in The Gift. 

If we are to speak fully of the poverty of artists, we must pause here to distinguish between actual penury and “the poverty of the gift.” By this last I intend to refer to an interior poverty, a spiritual poverty, which pertains to the gifted state. In that state, those things that are not gifts are judged to have no worth, and those things that are gifts are understood to be but temporary possessions. As I indicated in my chapter on the labor of gratitude, there is a sense in which our gifts are not fully ours until they are given away. The gifted man is not himself, therefore, until he has become the steward of wealth which appears from beyond his realm of influence and which, once it has come to him, he must continually disburse.

Have you experienced this form of positive precarity? I suspect you have, since so much of your work has been about lifting others up and inviting others into what you have learned. How can we seek out this open-handedness while resisting the exploitative kind of work which leads to destructive precarity?

Amanda: My favorite podcasts invite audiences into a conversation, a life, or a story. I love the feeling that someone was thinking about me when they made something—not me specifically, of course, but that the creator was thinking about how, where, and by whom their work would be experienced. My audience is constantly on my mind when making podcasts, and I think that’s what makes our work special to so many people. That’s also what I mean when I say that an episode has no value in a vacuum, and I think what Hyde is getting at with positive precarity. I’m sure there are artists out there who create for the pleasure or accomplishment of having created, but my work lives for and through an audience. 

I try to apply the same logic to my colleagues and peers in podcasting. Collaboration is anti-capitalist! Giving knowledge away for free undermines the scarcity and precarity upon which wealth is built. Sharing what I learn helps other creators build skills and self-reliance, which in turn helps build a resilient middle class of working creators. The more of us there are, the more power we have, and hopefully more choices too. My guiding principle so far is to create the resources and opportunities that I wish existed when I was starting out, and offer them freely to whoever might find them useful. 

There are absolutely gray areas, hard decisions, and people that take advantage—all of which takes on greater importance when I’m responsible for other people’s livings. And none of this is the same as asking someone to work for free, mistreating employees, paying in “exposure,” or denying people credit for or revenue share in work they did. I hope that my contributions can in some small way help another podcaster negotiate a contract, get fairer compensation, or spend wisely when starting a new show. 

Sharing is subversive. I could go on forever, so let those be my final words! Thanks a million for having me.

It’s been a pleasure to talk to Amanda, especially so I could satisfy some of my own curiosity about how she keeps all her projects going. I’d love to hear from you about how you pick creators to support and how you decide what to give away yourself.