Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Money for something

I usually read Facebook with the "Most Recent" setting, but on my pocket computer, the app opens to "Top Stories". Just now, I found the following two posts right next to each other (the first by a poet friend; the second by a novelist friend):
Are there any reading series in the U.S. not associated with a university or an organization like The Poetry Foundation that actually pay readers on a regular basis? I’m not immediately aware of any. Note: this is not fishing for myself. People often ask about money for readers when they ask about coming to San Diego, and I always wonder why they think there might be some. Not that it hurts to ask, of course.

Taylor Swift speaks for me. Maybe. I think. (As I try to figure out precisely what I'm going to do with this new novel.)
"Music is art, and art is important and rare," Swift wrote in the Journal. "Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."

I found the juxtaposition of the posts (and the vigorous discussion each generated) to be a symptom of how writers, artists, and musicians are thinking a lot about the relationship between money and their creative work.

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