“What is given away feeds again and again, while what is kept feeds only once and leaves us hungry.”
–from The Gift by Lewis Hyde
Why we need the Patronopolis
We need better ways to to support creative people.
After 11 years of art-making, I’m convinced that if we had better ways to support artists, they could dream bigger, create more boldly, and give more back. The Patronopolis meets this need by building community around a creative individual, and welcoming a supportive group into the process of making and sharing art. I invented this model because I need it, but I know I’m not alone. With your help, the Patronopolis could become a model used by artists all over the world. Creativity doesn’t follow rules. Artistic projects are quirky things. Sometimes they incubate for years. Sometimes they burst forth in a mad rush. Not even the most seasoned artist can predict how things will unfold; in fact, not knowing is often a key element of great art. The Patronopolis says yes to losing control. It nourishes the whole endeavor — process, product, and the journey between them — and gives supporters a window into the artist’s world. Because this model grew organically out of my artistic experience, I believe it is better-adapted to its purpose than alternative models artists use to support themselves. It’s efficient, effective, and more meaningful for donors, too. We’re starving for artists. Everywhere I go, people tell me they wish they were singing more, dancing more, painting more, writing more. In our culture, it’s very easy to feel alienated from our creativity, because we lack communal opportunities to experience it. Tthe truth is, none of us can activate our creativity in isolation. We all need each other in order to make and share our artistic gifts. By bringing people together around that concept, The Patronopolis carves out a space where we can all find companionship and inspiration. |
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Core principles of the Patronopolis
1) Art-making is gift-giving.
The Patronopolis is predicated on the belief that at the most fundamental level, works of art are gifts.
2) Gifts want to move.
Gifts have momentum. All the things we create — songs, stories, children — come with an impulse to be given away, to be set free, to move.
The Patronopolis facilitates this motion.
3) Community liberates creativity.
Artists can dream bigger, create more boldly, and give more back if communities are invited to help fuel the process.
4) Use the right tool for the job.
We would never apply an artistic process to the task of making and selling McDonald’s hamburgers. And yet we do the reverse all the time: we apply the rules of the market economy to making art. It doesn’t work. The Patronopolis is a tool designed for one specific job: funding creativity.
1) Art-making is gift-giving.
The Patronopolis is predicated on the belief that at the most fundamental level, works of art are gifts.
2) Gifts want to move.
Gifts have momentum. All the things we create — songs, stories, children — come with an impulse to be given away, to be set free, to move.
The Patronopolis facilitates this motion.
3) Community liberates creativity.
Artists can dream bigger, create more boldly, and give more back if communities are invited to help fuel the process.
4) Use the right tool for the job.
We would never apply an artistic process to the task of making and selling McDonald’s hamburgers. And yet we do the reverse all the time: we apply the rules of the market economy to making art. It doesn’t work. The Patronopolis is a tool designed for one specific job: funding creativity.
More about the core principles:
1) Art-making is gift-giving.
A work of art differs from a commodity in both origin and ultimate destination. Although it can be packaged, marketed and sold, art is not made only or primarily for the purpose of generating profit. As Lewis Hyde writes, “works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” We don’t need to get hung up on value judgments about the difference between art and commodities, but we do need to recognize that there is a difference.
2) Gifts want to move.
We’re all familiar with the movement of commodities from one place to another. Computer chips, Toyotas, Fruit Loops — they are all bought, sold, transported from here to there. Gifts move too, but in a way that’s more mysterious — and potentially more deeply satisfying — than the quid-pro-quo to which we’re so accustomed. Hyde says “the gift moves toward the empty place” and although there may be a trade involved “gift exchange is not a form of barter….I give to someone from whom I do not receive (and yet I do receive elsewhere)…as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly. And I will feel a sort of blind gratitude as well.”
What this means in the context of the Patronopolis is that everyone who participates gives something, not to get something specific in return, but for less easily calculated benefits. Donors are giving to an artist with hope that she’ll create something interesting out of their gifts. The artist makes and shares the work without knowing exactly who will receive it, or how it will be meaningful to them. There is no final tally — just a sense of gratification as the work keeps moving, because unlike a commodity, a gift increases in value as more hands touch it. Hyde writes, “when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.”
3) Community liberates creativity.
For all the virtues of self-reliance, it can also isolate and restrict us. Patronopolis members are carving out a small space in which interdependence is recognized and celebrated. In these micro-habitats, saying “I need you” is not a sign of weakness or incapacity, but rather an invitation to connect, and to become useful to one another. As Thomas Merton writes in Choosing the Love the World, “…openness to the gifts of all beings…[is] an expression of the interdependence of all beings.”
4) Use the right tool for the job.
If you care about the arts, there’s a good chance that you carry around a certain ennui — a sense of unrealized potential, an awareness of creative energy being blocked. We’ve become habituated to these feelings. In fact, we’ve internalized them. We romanticize the “starving artist.” We tell ourselves that we are inferior to explain our disconnection from our creativity.
The Patronopolis takes a more practical approach. Maybe artists aren’t born to starve, maybe everyone else isn’t doomed to feel like a creative failure. Maybe we’re just using the wrong tool for the job. Maybe the market economy — which is a really powerful tool for making and selling commodities — isn’t so good at making and sharing art.
If that’s the case, then the obvious follow-up is: what would a good tool look like? What kind of economic system would nurture creativity — not just in artists, but in everyone?
The Patronopolis is an attempt to design a small-scale economic system around the realities of art-making, rather than trying to get it to conform to a pre-existing system which was designed for something else. An ambitious goal, to be sure, but because the model can be applied one artist and one community at a time, perhaps an attainable one. One of the best things about the Patronopolis is that it is about saying yes to something, rather than saying no. Nothing has to be torn down in order for it to work. All that’s needed are a few hundred people at a time, willing to carve out small pockets of space for community supported art. This ability to coexist within the current system is what makes the Patronopolis truly possible — and revolutionary.
I am deeply grateful to Lewis Hyde for his book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. In it, I found thoughtful affirmation both for my need for help and my instinct to give my gifts away — two aspects of my process which are looked upon with suspicion in the mainstream economy. Because of The Gift, I have been able to see these supposedly problematic issues for what they truly are: expressions of my desire to align my artistic process — and its products — with the true nature of art-making, which I believe is essentially a process of receiving, making, and sharing gifts.
More from The Gift:
“When the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to.”
– p. 19
“What is given away feeds again and again,
while what is kept feeds only once and leaves us hungry.”
– p. 26
“People with a sense of the gift not only speak of it as food to eat but also feed it…The nourishment flows both ways.”
– p. 46
“Usury and trade have their own sort of growth, but they bring neither the personal transformations nor the social and spiritual cohesion of gift exchange.”
– p. 147
“[In the tribe]…a needy person is not seen as having a separate and personal problem. His neediness is felt throughout the group, and its wealth flows toward the need and fills it without reflection or debate, just as water flows immediately to fill the lowest place.”
– p. 148
“Even our creations — especially our creations — do not belong to us….Spiritually, you can’t be much poorer than gifted.”
– p. 364
“In an age when the rich imagine themselves to be self-made, we should not be surprised…to find artists who…seek to speak to us in that prophetic voice which would create a world more hospitable to the creative spirit.”
– p. 365
1) Art-making is gift-giving.
A work of art differs from a commodity in both origin and ultimate destination. Although it can be packaged, marketed and sold, art is not made only or primarily for the purpose of generating profit. As Lewis Hyde writes, “works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” We don’t need to get hung up on value judgments about the difference between art and commodities, but we do need to recognize that there is a difference.
2) Gifts want to move.
We’re all familiar with the movement of commodities from one place to another. Computer chips, Toyotas, Fruit Loops — they are all bought, sold, transported from here to there. Gifts move too, but in a way that’s more mysterious — and potentially more deeply satisfying — than the quid-pro-quo to which we’re so accustomed. Hyde says “the gift moves toward the empty place” and although there may be a trade involved “gift exchange is not a form of barter….I give to someone from whom I do not receive (and yet I do receive elsewhere)…as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly. And I will feel a sort of blind gratitude as well.”
What this means in the context of the Patronopolis is that everyone who participates gives something, not to get something specific in return, but for less easily calculated benefits. Donors are giving to an artist with hope that she’ll create something interesting out of their gifts. The artist makes and shares the work without knowing exactly who will receive it, or how it will be meaningful to them. There is no final tally — just a sense of gratification as the work keeps moving, because unlike a commodity, a gift increases in value as more hands touch it. Hyde writes, “when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.”
3) Community liberates creativity.
For all the virtues of self-reliance, it can also isolate and restrict us. Patronopolis members are carving out a small space in which interdependence is recognized and celebrated. In these micro-habitats, saying “I need you” is not a sign of weakness or incapacity, but rather an invitation to connect, and to become useful to one another. As Thomas Merton writes in Choosing the Love the World, “…openness to the gifts of all beings…[is] an expression of the interdependence of all beings.”
4) Use the right tool for the job.
If you care about the arts, there’s a good chance that you carry around a certain ennui — a sense of unrealized potential, an awareness of creative energy being blocked. We’ve become habituated to these feelings. In fact, we’ve internalized them. We romanticize the “starving artist.” We tell ourselves that we are inferior to explain our disconnection from our creativity.
The Patronopolis takes a more practical approach. Maybe artists aren’t born to starve, maybe everyone else isn’t doomed to feel like a creative failure. Maybe we’re just using the wrong tool for the job. Maybe the market economy — which is a really powerful tool for making and selling commodities — isn’t so good at making and sharing art.
If that’s the case, then the obvious follow-up is: what would a good tool look like? What kind of economic system would nurture creativity — not just in artists, but in everyone?
The Patronopolis is an attempt to design a small-scale economic system around the realities of art-making, rather than trying to get it to conform to a pre-existing system which was designed for something else. An ambitious goal, to be sure, but because the model can be applied one artist and one community at a time, perhaps an attainable one. One of the best things about the Patronopolis is that it is about saying yes to something, rather than saying no. Nothing has to be torn down in order for it to work. All that’s needed are a few hundred people at a time, willing to carve out small pockets of space for community supported art. This ability to coexist within the current system is what makes the Patronopolis truly possible — and revolutionary.
I am deeply grateful to Lewis Hyde for his book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. In it, I found thoughtful affirmation both for my need for help and my instinct to give my gifts away — two aspects of my process which are looked upon with suspicion in the mainstream economy. Because of The Gift, I have been able to see these supposedly problematic issues for what they truly are: expressions of my desire to align my artistic process — and its products — with the true nature of art-making, which I believe is essentially a process of receiving, making, and sharing gifts.
More from The Gift:
“When the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to.”
– p. 19
“What is given away feeds again and again,
while what is kept feeds only once and leaves us hungry.”
– p. 26
“People with a sense of the gift not only speak of it as food to eat but also feed it…The nourishment flows both ways.”
– p. 46
“Usury and trade have their own sort of growth, but they bring neither the personal transformations nor the social and spiritual cohesion of gift exchange.”
– p. 147
“[In the tribe]…a needy person is not seen as having a separate and personal problem. His neediness is felt throughout the group, and its wealth flows toward the need and fills it without reflection or debate, just as water flows immediately to fill the lowest place.”
– p. 148
“Even our creations — especially our creations — do not belong to us….Spiritually, you can’t be much poorer than gifted.”
– p. 364
“In an age when the rich imagine themselves to be self-made, we should not be surprised…to find artists who…seek to speak to us in that prophetic voice which would create a world more hospitable to the creative spirit.”
– p. 365