Why I don’t have a Patreon or other paid services, Part 2

When I wrote about why I don’t have a Patreon subscriber account a few years ago, I meant every word. I still do. I have some additional thoughts now, though, that I want to expand on. In our monetize-your-love culture, it’s pretty hard to escape the idea that every single thing you enjoy can be mined for some sort of revenue stream. I think it’s warped our ability to just do things we love and love them freely. Sometimes carving a coconut is its own reward.

Let’s address the elephant in my room

That bright pinky-orange “Support me” down in the lower left of your screen.

Last November I was dreaming about what I wanted to do this year, and one of the goals I set was to start being intentional about having more art community time. The Workshop grew out of that. It’s a once-a-month Zoom work-along where people show up with their art and we make and chat. (The first one was amazing! We had such lovely conversation and I felt like we forged good connections.¹)

I decided it would be free for anyone who wanted to attend. And then I looked at the cost of Zoom for a year.

I didn’t want to charge people to hang out. That feels icky to me. But also sometimes people don’t appreciate what they don’t have a stake in. So I started thinking about how many crochet pattern designers I love are now using a sliding scale to charge for their patterns where they leave people on the honor system to pay what they can afford. This felt right to me: letting people decide how (or if) they can contribute. So I set up a ko-fi account and use it purely to defray the cost of Zoom for The Workshop. At some point later this year, if the Zoom debt gets paid or even half way paid, I’ll likely take the button off of my page.

Pay-to-play

We all need to be making our own art, whether that’s painting on a canvas, bookmaking, knitting, cooking a new dish, experimenting with coconut carving, or writing some poetry. And we need to be doing those things because they feed our soul, not because we are trying to figure out how to monetize them.

I’ve thought a lot the past two weeks about gatekeeping. What that looks like in the artists’ communities I’m in and around. How creative pursuits are being squeezed from all sides: corporate conformity, AI, the insistence we turn every single thing we do into a side hustle, the lack of social safety net leading to a dearth of leisure time. It’s a full on dumpster fire. But I think we need art free of all of that even more because of it.

The internet has democratized all sorts of creative activities while at the same time making the side hustle thing so much worse. We are able to share so many things for free (as long as you have a device and hot and cold running internet so you can access those free things). At the same time, there’s just so many pay-to-play activities out there. And pay-to-play is where things start getting really gatekeepy.

I don’t own the process of how to take avocado pits and make dye out of them. Neither does anyone else, though, because it turns out people have been dyeing things with avocado pits for thousands of years. Information about how to do it is freely available on the internet, and yet there are still a bunch of paid classes out there showing people how to do it. How to put their twist on it.

I use this example because I’ve taught a class on eco-dying. Before I started filming it I was super worried about stepping on the toes of other peoples’ classes. Classes I had bought and paid for in the past. I didn’t want to get in a turf war over who gets to talk about freezing food waste and boiling it later so you can dye yarn and paper with it. So I had to think about how to really make it my own. And I can’t imagine there isn’t someone out there who had done the exact same process as I have. Because, let’s be real, there’s just nothing new under the sun.

I’ll reiterate from my previous post: pay artists directly

You should absolutely pay people for their creative work, particularly minorities. And what that looks like is different for every artist. I only offer finished art pieces for sale, though not very often lately because I’ve had other things going on. Other artists may be selling their work AND/OR classes AND/OR some sort of manufactured supplies. However you contribute is helpful and so real for many, many artists. We artists are usually a pretty grateful lot. When you buy something, it feels like you are choosing us. And who doesn’t love to feel chosen?

Writing myself into a corner

Talking about this is complex and nuanced. When I was writing the previous post I often felt like I was backing myself into a corner with contradictory statements. This post is no different. “Go find things on the internet for free! But also pay artists!” I realize those things are seemingly in contrast with one another, and yet somehow they aren’t. I guess what I’m saying is, we have to be aware of these things and be intentional and thoughtful in our actions. I choose to do that by putting out a lot of things for free. Not every artist has that luxury.

A community I’ve been a part of for a long time changed their pay structure pretty drastically in the past month. It left a lot of people hurt. It also brought all of these things back to mind, so I’ve been processing again how I feel about what I do and how I do it. How to be an ethical artist/human, I guess. Talking to you about it always sharpens things up for me. So thanks for reading.

How is this sitting with you? Catch up with me on socials, email me, or go old school and leave a comment on this post to be immortalized for all of time.

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