Here's how this could work in the arts. A city-wide agency, like the local cultural council, could offer an "Art Card" to all residents. Eligibility would be based on financial aid criteria like that described above, particularly tax returns. This information would be fed into a formula that would then be connected to the resident's account with the city agency. The Art Card would then act something like a supermarket loyalty card for its holder, with a preset individualized discount off of any posted price for participating organizations. So say I want to go to City Opera. I buy a $50 ticket, present my Art Card to the box office or the website form, and am told that my price for this ticket will be $37.16 based on my personal financial situation. This setup would be expensive to implement, but it would be fundamentally fair -- and would have the additional benefits to participating organizations of allowing them to dispense with other hard-to-verify discounts andraise prices on their highest-income customers (just as colleges and private schools have been doing with tuition for years). It also benefits residents and extracts value from tourists, something any local government should be able to get behind. And if institutions are reluctant to play along, the city could always make participation in the program a requirement of receiving grant funds (at least for its largest institutions).
Imagine that instead of your Facebook account being just acquaintances and friends, it is a social network of self-selected audience members who want to follow your work. Let's say that one of the audience members on your list is convinced that you as Playwright A simply must work with Director B, Actors C, D and E, and Designer F. That audience member then proposes the idea of this collaboration to the network of all six artists. Let's say that 500 audience members following each artist agree that this collaboration has to happen. These 3,000 people each give $20 to the project, and $60,000 is now raised. Perhaps this donation serves as their ticket as well, making the project sell out its first few weeks (assuming the online functionality could handle some form of self-reservations).
These artists now have enough seed money to create a unique work of art with revenue generated solely by an audience already committed to seeing it. Each audience member is a producer, and as such, is intimately more connected to the project, and more likely to follow the artists' work afterwards. Each artist sees their audience base grow significantly from the crossover.
Distributedness through rigorously-managed networks sounds good, but gaming the system would have to be planned for and blocked, like any Denial of Service attack.
Just because we use new tools doesn't mean people won't find old ways around them.
TDF works like the first idea; a F2F system of friends with money, like the second. Both plans open up those circles to more participation, and more risk.
Posted by: cgeye | May 28, 2009 at 05:46 PM
"Let's say that one of the audience members on your list is convinced that you as Playwright A simply must work with Director B, Actors C, D and E, and Designer F. That audience member then proposes the idea of this collaboration to the network of all six artists."
This idea is what I thought Facebook would be for me when I joined it--a place to network, collaborate,create partnerships, etc. Though I have hundreds of theater-artist friends (playwrights, directors, actors, etc.), each of them, understandably, seems caught up in their own thing (i.e., they all have much more going on career-wise than I do), and not in the market for creating new collectives.
This really does sound like a great idea, as long as you could rigorously monitor/safeguard the money being donated.
Posted by: Ken | May 29, 2009 at 10:25 AM