[Dixielandjazz] Giving it away! NYTimes 10-26-2013

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML; Musicians and Jazzfans list;  Pensacola Mencken list

From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

 

Jerry Gordon posted this information below on DJML.  It's pertinent to the
long discussions about value of one's time and services. I went to the link
but it didn't come up for me.

Since I'm a subscriber to NYT, I was able to manipulate the system and bring
up/copy for those who may not be able, otherwise, to do so.

Thanks, Jerry, for your pertinent comments.

 

As the saying goes for  those musicians who play for nothing, that's about
what their services are worth!  (smile)

Reprint of the article below is for your convenience.  

 

Since this also goes to the Pensacola Mencken list, I suspect that HLM
likely didn't give away his work, either!

Norman

 

Jerry Gordon wrote:

Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 10:56:34 -0400

From: "Jerry Gordon" <jerrygordon at juno.com>

 

There have been several discussions here in the past on the subject of

playing for free. Here's a link to a relevant opinion piece in today's

NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/slaves-of-the-internet-unit

e.html?nl=todaysheadlines

 

  _____  

NEW YORK TIMES October 26, 2013


Slaves of the Internet, Unite!


By TIM KREIDER


NOT long ago, I received, in a single week, three (3) invitations to write
an original piece for publication or give a prepared speech in exchange for
no ($0.00) money. As with stinkbugs, it's not any one instance of this
request but their sheer number and relentlessness that make them so
tiresome. It also makes composing a polite response a heroic exercise in
restraint. 

People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to
give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a
straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn't be willing to
write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often
start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enough,
evidently, to pay one cent for it. "Unfortunately we don't have the budget
to offer compensation to our contributors..." is how the pertinent line
usually starts. But just as often, they simply omit any mention of payment. 

A familiar figure in one's 20s is the club owner or event promoter who
explains to your band that they won't be paying you in money, man, because
you're getting paid in the far more valuable currency of exposure. This same
figure reappears over the years, like the devil, in different guises - with
shorter hair, a better suit - as the editor of a Web site or magazine,
dismissing the issue of payment as an irrelevant quibble and impressing upon
you how many hits they get per day, how many eyeballs, what great exposure
it'll offer. "Artist Dies of Exposure" goes the rueful joke. 

In fairness, most of the people who ask me to write things for free, with
the exception of Arianna Huffington, aren't the Man; they're editors of
struggling magazines or sites, or school administrators who are probably
telling me the truth about their budgets. The economy is still largely in
ruins, thanks to the people who "drive the economy" by doing imaginary
things on Wall Street, and there just isn't much money left to spare for
people who do actual things anymore. 

This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which "paying
for things" is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling
people after having sex with them. The first time I ever heard the word
"content" used in its current context, I understood that all my artist
friends and I - henceforth, "content providers" - were essentially extinct.
This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it's the
delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called "art" -
writing, music, film, photography, illustration - to the status of filler,
stuff to stick between banner ads. 

Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war
obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism's ultimate feat of
self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible
for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It's especially
hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of
charge. I now contribute to some of the most prestigious online publications
in the English-speaking world, for which I am paid the same amount as, if
not less than, I was paid by my local alternative weekly when I sold my
first piece of writing for print in 1989. More recently, I had the essay
equivalent of a hit single - endlessly linked to, forwarded and reposted. A
friend of mine joked, wistfully, "If you had a dime for every time someone
posted that ..." Calculating the theoretical sum of those dimes, it didn't
seem all that funny. 

I've been trying to understand the mentality that leads people who wouldn't
ask a stranger to give them a keychain or a Twizzler to ask me to write them
a thousand words for nothing. I have to admit my empathetic imagination is
failing me here. I suppose people who aren't artists assume that being one
must be fun since, after all, we do choose to do it despite the fact that no
one pays us. They figure we must be flattered to have someone ask us to do
our little thing we already do. 

I will freely admit that writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for
a living, but it's still shockingly unenjoyable work. I spent 20 years and
wrote thousands of pages learning the trivial craft of putting sentences
together. My parents blew tens of thousands of 1980s dollars on tuition at a
prestigious institution to train me for this job. They also put my sister
the pulmonologist through medical school, and as far as I know nobody ever
asks her to perform a quick lobectomy - doesn't have to be anything fancy,
maybe just in her spare time, whatever she can do would be great - because
it'll help get her name out there. 

Maybe they're asking in the collaborative, D.I.Y. spirit that allegedly
characterizes the artistic community. I have read Lewis Hyde's "The Gift,"
and participated in a gift economy for 20 years, swapping zines and
minicomics with friends and colleagues, contributing to little literary
magazines, doing illustrations for bands and events and causes, posting a
decade's worth of cartoons and essays on my Web site free of charge. Not
getting paid for things in your 20s is glumly expected, even sort of cool;
not getting paid in your 40s, when your back is starting to hurt and you are
still sleeping on a futon, considerably less so. Let's call the first 20
years of my career a gift. Now I am 46, and would like a bed. 

Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being
told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is,
frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live
in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can't help but
internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less
than a bona fide grown-up. 

I know I sound like some middle-aged sourpuss who's forgotten why he ever
wanted to do this in the first place. But I'm secretly not as mercenary as
I'm trying to pretend. One of the three people who asked me to do something
for nothing that dispiriting week was a graduate student in a social work
program asking me if I'd speak to her class. I first sent her my boilerplate
demurral, but soon found myself mulling over the topic she'd suggested,
involuntarily thinking up things to say. I had gotten interested. Oh,
dammit, I thought. I knew then I was going to do the talk. And after all,
they were student social workers, who were never going to make much money
either because they'd chosen to go into the business, which our society also
deems worthless, of trying to help people. Also, she was very pretty. 

"Let us not kid ourselves," Professor Vladimir Nabokov reminds us. "Let us
remember that literature is of no practical value whatsoever. ... " But
practical value isn't the only kind of value. Ours is a mixed economy, with
the gift economy of the arts existing (if not exactly flourishing) within
the inhospitable conditions of a market economy, like the fragile black
market in human decency that keeps civilization going despite the pitiless
dictates of self-interest. 

My field of expertise is complaining, not answers. I know there's no point
in demanding that businesspeople pay artists for their work, any more than
there is in politely asking stink bugs or rhinoviruses to quit it already.
It's their job to be rapacious and shameless. But they can get away with
paying nothing only for the same reason so many sleazy guys keep trying to
pick up women by insulting them: because it keeps working on someone. There
is a bottomless supply of ambitious young artists in all media who believe
the line about exposure, or who are simply so thrilled at the prospect of
publication that they're happy to do it free of charge. 

I STILL remember how this felt: the first piece I ever got nationally
published was in a scholarly journal that paid in contributors' copies, but
I've never had a happier moment in my career. And it's not strictly true
that you never benefit from exposure - being published in The New York Times
helped get me an agent, who got me a book deal, which got me some dates. But
let it be noted that The Times also pays in the form of money, albeit in
very modest amounts. 

So I'm writing this not only in the hope that everyone will cross me off the
list of writers to hit up for free content but, more important, to make a
plea to my younger colleagues. As an older, more accomplished, equally
unsuccessful artist, I beseech you, don't give it away. As a matter of
principle. Do it for your colleagues, your fellow artists, because if we all
consistently say no they might, eventually, take the hint. It shouldn't be
professionally or socially acceptable - it isn't right - for people to tell
us, over and over, that our vocation is worthless. 

Here, for public use, is my very own template for a response to people who
offer to let me write something for them for nothing: 

Thanks very much for your compliments on my [writing/illustration/whatever
thing you do]. I'm flattered by your invitation to [do whatever it is they
want you to do for nothing]. But [thing you do] is work, it takes time, it's
how I make my living, and in this economy I can't afford to do it for free.
I'm sorry to decline, but thanks again, sincerely, for your kind words about
my work. 

Feel free to amend as necessary. This I'm willing to give away. 

Tim Kreider is the author <http://timkreider.com/>  of "We Learn Nothing," a
collection of essays and cartoons.