Aug 11, 2018
“Increasingly, part of the job of artists is to foster and sustain ongoing interaction with a community of individual fans. Artists must balance their audiences’ need to connect with them and with one another with their own economic and social needs”
This short piece brings up a lot of questions I like about the labour involved for an artist to maintain a relationship with their fan community.
What does it mean to “connect with fans”? How to artists do it? What do they get out of it? How might they feel about it?
In the context of hyper service-orientated late stage capitalism managing emotions and relationships are key to lots of the work we do, but rarely acknowledged as labour.
#this is written in quite academic language so not the most accessible#relational labour#nancy baym#artist-fan relationships#she's got a really great understanding of the tensions at play when it comes to#art as a participatory thing#this plays into the idea of an artist and their work as a larger social construct built by a community of individual fans#artists don't get to control their image and the conversations about their art#for all that they start the conversation and influence it#the communication flow isn't one way artist>fan