The Amanda Palmer Problem: Why Have So Many Turned on Her?

I’ve always been a big Amanda Palmer fan.  Yes, she can be a bit polarizing in her appeal, but damn the woman is (a) talented; (b) ambitious; and (c) hard-working.  So why have so many people lined up against her lately?  The Vulture tries to find out.

She’s politely explained and defended her choices at length on her blog, but the forum Palmer chose to unpack her philosophy as a whole turned out to be both the most ideologically friendly and the easiest to mock: She recently gave a TED talk.

As TED talks go, it hit all of the right marks. She wrapped the length of her career, from street performer to lecturer, around the kind of single, simple insight that appeals to people who regularly consume fairy tales about creatively “disrupting” established business models and summoning Utopia via wWi-Fi. Her relationship with fans, she explained, is the economic equivalent of crowd-surfing — leaping out into an ocean of people and trusting their love and enthusiasm to keep you afloat.

This may not be understood, she noted, by the casual observer; it may seem in some way that she’s begging for indulgence and resources. But what those observers don’t see, she said, is that an actualexchange is taking place between her and the audience, in an economy that consists partly of cash money, but also of art, love, care, reassurance, joy, and other literally invaluable gifts.

She described a fan’s family, undocumented immigrants from Honduras, sleeping in their front room so she and her band could crash on their beds, and she described herself wondering: “Is this fair?” In the morning, she was told in broken English how much her music meant to the daughter who invited her, and thanked for coming, and she decided: Yes, this is fair.

Read the whole thing here.