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Friday, August 08, 2008
Selling Yourself: Tao Lin and Wallace Shawn
The move appears to have been successful; shares are no longer available and Lin got written up in several mainstream publications, including a fairly lengthy piece in the Telegraph, and dozens of blogs. What nobody mentioned, however, is that this has been done before, some 40 years ago, by another outsized, New York personality.
In the early years of his career, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn did the same thing, according to a John Lahr piece that originally ran in the New Yorker and is collected in his book of profiles, Show and Tell published in 2000. Shawn, son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, was a struggling writer going out of his way to achieve literary success without tapping into his father's considerable influence. Lahr writes:
Back then, Wally was forced to follow his own quirky, unconventional path. He told me he'd "sold stock in himself" - his way of rationalizing a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loan he took from a consortium of friends in the sixties, in order to go off and write his plays. (To this day, the investors receive a small yearly check).The juxtaposition of the two schemes presents an interesting notion. $2,500 40 years ago got you some small percentage of a budding artist's career in perpetuity. $2,000 now only gets you 10% of the royalties for a novel. Inflation, I suppose.
Finally, despite Shawn's scheme (I believe) initially being revealed in a New Yorker piece and despite Shawn's obvious ties to the magazine, The New Yorker, in its (admittedly very brief) mention of Lin's plan on its own blog, did not catch the Shawn connection.
Given the fractured state of publishing and the enthusiasm for trying new models, perhaps this shareholder form of patronage will take off, but it will have been Shawn, not Lin, who was the first innovator.
- C. Max Magee @ 3:04 PM ~ comments: 4 ~
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Anonymous @ August 08, 2008 4:37 PM What is interesting about Lin and Shawn's schemes is the idea of taking on investors and sharing the spoils of your art rather than relying on commissions (which it seems is what patronage mostly amounted to). In this more "modern" way of doing things, the artist would seem to retain more control, though I suppose there are shareholders to think about. And as with any "corporation," one is obligated to look after their interests.
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