I’ve always loved Renoir. When I was given a pack of pastels at age nine, my first act was to recreate Two Young Girls at the Piano. This knockoff—stylistically crude but visually inoffensive—hung above the piano for most of my young life. When I finally made it to the Musée d’Orsay, just this past year, I shared a photo of the real thing with my brother. He cheekily replied, “Yours was better.”

The first thing I do in any museum is seek out the Renoirs. Thanks to his prolificacy, I am nearly always in luck. These artworks tend to be objectively remarkable, of course, but there is also a sting of nostalgia, of childhood, of love for something because it is beautiful and well made. Renoir’s painting of the Grand Canal is a compelling, evocative work, aligned with the artist’s usual palette, yet distinctly Venetian. It is also a painting of a place that is disappearing. Depending on the acqua alta, Renoir painted perhaps 30 centimeters of the buildings along the canal that will never be seen again.

Art offers an occasion to see the world through another’s eyes, and I am often pleased to see the world through Renoir’s. I laughed upon learning how differently Italy’s élite first received his vision—one critic called it “the most outrageous series of ferocious daubs that any slanderer of Venice could possibly imagine.” Such stories are common in art history. Artistic invention is, at the outset, often branded as heresy. But if we are fortunate, time passes, and what we once renounced hangs on the walls.

Acqua alta, or “high water,” refers to the periodic flooding of the Adriatic Sea. The floodwater can temporarily flood Venice.

A. J. Bermudez is the author of STORIES NO ONE HOPES ARE ABOUT THEM (University of Iowa Press, 2022), and is winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the PAGE Award, the Diverse Voices Award, and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize.

My friend Zoe died in the first wave of the pandemic, one of 20,000 New Yorkers lost in a period when leaders denied the virus, denied its power to empty streets and hollow out our lives. Americans have always been afraid of death, and in the hubris of those early days, when we didn’t have enough tests to diagnose the sick nor enough masks to protect the healthy, many still had the luxury of discounting the dead, the clearest indicator of our failure. It’s just like the flu, they said, you’re young, don’t worry. Meanwhile, New York hospitals overflowed; corpses were stacked on wooden racks inside humming, refrigerated trailers.

Zoe was thirty, and her final month on the ventilator seemed antithetical to her large, loud life. She was unable to speak or breathe, swallowed up by the machine meant to save her. Silence equals Death, AIDS activists used to say. I think of her now when I revisit Paul Thek’s “meat pieces,” a series of neon-yellow and turquoise-blue Plexiglas vitrines that house meticulously crafted, sinewy slabs of meat. The hunks glisten inside their boxes, threaded with tubes or stacked into ziggurats; cavities ooze black marrow, while African flies feast on exposed fat and gleaming tissue. The body horror of these pieces prefigured the horror of the AIDS epidemic, which eventually consumed Thek himself.

Amid COVID denial and cool, contactless death, the grotesque sensuality of these sculptures is oddly reassuring. The emotional heat of Thek’s “meat pieces”—marrow licking vitrine floor, flies dancing over flesh—bleeds through the sleek, inexpressive surfaces meant to contain them. Zoe, too, ran hot, breaking the constraints of decorum. She cursed and cackled; she overshared and encouraged me to overshare in turn. There’s so much I want to tell you, Zoe. I miss your hugs, your sarcasm, your messy humanity. But you’re not here, so I study the hairs that worm up through the lid of a vitrine, writhing, amassing, each hair desperate to reach out, to break free. And I pray, Lord, in your mercy, grant us our heat. Grant these most humble desires the breath of life.

Paul Thek (1933-1988) was an American artist who worked in a variety of media. The “meat pieces” comprise a series called Technological Reliquaries. Thek was born and died in New York City. His work is on permanent display at The Watermill Center on Long Island.

Steven Tagle is a writer based in Greece. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Institute of Current World Affairs, Fulbright Greece and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Exodus • The artist John Baldessari, who died in 2020, was born in 1933, in National City, California, an industrial, working-class suburb that borders the south San Diego neighborhoods of Encanto, Skyline, and Paradise Hills. He taught at community colleges, was well-liked, and pursued the shock of the new, movements with manifestos, in the 1960s, many of which were trapped, as the critic Barry Schwabsky wrote, “between expressionist agony and academic restraint.”1 He stayed in National City and searched for venues to show his work. He got so tired of rejection that he, like lots of talented locals, left his “invisible” hometown for Los Angeles at 37. We read a lot about him these days because, post-death, art elites are finally, truly, prizing his work, one of the nimblest practitioners of Conceptualism, the postmodern irreverence that art can be about art or against art.

A trickster in the tradition of the Dadaists—put a frame around anything or stick an object in a museum and, set apart, voilà, it’s “art”—Baldessari made a series of images, combining banal snapshots, often over- or underdeveloped, with a mundane comment, in Calvin Tomkins’s phrase, “photography-based art-about-art.” He drove around National City and took Polaroids of the ordinary: local stores, billboards, street scenes. He attached witty titles like “Econ-o-Wash, 14th and Highland” to one shot or, to a whole series of photos, “The Backs of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, Calif., Sunday 20 Jan. 63.” These pieces noticed the unsightliness of the everyday with a kind of eventless curiosity. He dubbed one set of such photo-texts “Pure Beauty.” (His standard flippant response: “Truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.”) As for his product, he conceptualized an “art” that would take minimal effort to produce—stretch a canvas, glom on via photo-emulsion a photograph, send it off to a trained sign painter to letter the title on the lower half of the canvas. The titles were tongue-in-cheek: “Is this art?” or “I will not make any more boring art.” He bent-if-not-broke our expectations about fine art as “labor-intensive”—the sedulous genius, like Rembrandt, who never leaves his atelier. Instead, Baldessari emphasized the DIY view that the very specialness of the found and the accidental, the wry and the plain, had value if only to its facetious creator.

Developing this anti-aesthetic in the late 1950s, early 1960s, Baldessari pitched local galleries and was laughed out. As object and muse, National City, famous for its “Mile of Cars,” not its licentious spirit, was an oxymoron—still is. Better put, it’s a place that isn’t quite “here” or “there,” because of its banality, its obviousness, yet is seen, recorded, and interpreted by the artist. If anywhere, the unnoticeable is in-between, its identity desultory, its location ever near-to. In the environs of San Diego, National City is near-to but not the beach; it’s near-to but not downtown; it’s near-to but not the Navy-anchored bay; it’s near-to but not the border with Mexico. It’s close by the jewels of Balboa Park, the coastal surf funk, fresh seafood restaurants, harbor cruises, the Vietnamese strip malls—all that just a short drive away, provided, these days, you can find parking. National City is set apart but so is any other mundane landmark: Baldessari’s point.

Nothing stirring, Baldessari sought action in the mecca to the north, artists and art investors in Los Angeles, the historical ground of the California Impressionists and Pop Art formalists like Ed Ruscha. Baldessari I-5’ed himself to LA and studied at the Otis Art Institute (1957-1959), after which he returned to National City and taught classes. (Famously, he had a degree not in studio art but in art education and was an inspiring teacher. Ever the self-mocking truth teller, he said, “I didn’t even know who Matisse or Picasso were when I went to college.”) In the 1960s, he would drive to LA once a month to view exhibits (nothing in San Diego stirred him), among them a Duchamp retrospective in Pasadena as well as Andy Warhol’s first one-person show of Campbell’s soup cans at the Ferus Gallery near the Sunset Strip. After Baldessari fashioned the photo-text images, David Antin, of the newly staffed Fine Arts Department at UC San Diego, arranged for a show—where else but the very hip Molly Barnes Gallery in LA. Antin said later that “There was a deadpan comedy about those literal pictures of a desperately uninteresting town [National City]—the image of provincialism as a front for considerable intelligence and wit.”

Which, because of such praise, invites the question: How much can a desperately sad and plain-Jane hometown absorb one’s artistic interest? Apparently, quite a lot.

Though very few works he did until 1968 attracted buyers, Baldessari felt the photo-text pieces captured his nice-guy/bad-boy sensibility. Memorializing his self-definition was an epiphany: For a commemorative performance piece, he decided to burn everything (123 pieces) he’d done prior to 1966, except the photo-text images. He called the conflagration the Cremation Project and, in its honor, had the following statement notarized: “[A]ll works of art done by the undersigned [J.B.] between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.” The sole commonality these “works of art” had was that they never sold.2 To bury them, respectfully, he searched for a local mortuary who might burn the paintings; most said no until one finally agreed, but only after hours. Of the ashes left, he had them baked into “cookies” and put into a single jar: Another work of art, exiled from itself, but still, for sale.

Post-blaze, Baldessari worried that he’d never get out of National City. He was married with two kids; he loved teaching and his students but despaired—not even the Cremation Project put him on the map or into the discussion. Years later, in 1996 and lionized by contemporary critics and collectors, he recalled his “fond frustration” with San Diego as a place he knew he had to leave: “There should be more than one newspaper in the town,” he said. “There should be more than one or two art critics. That’s just for openers. The same things still remain twenty-plus years after I left San Diego. Why? Everything else has grown. I don’t get it.”3

In 1970, he took a job at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, a half-hour northeast of Los Angeles, the Disney-funded school where animators and artists of all stripes study. There, he mentored many artists (the collagist David Salle was one) who diverged from Baldessari’s conceptualism but did absorb his love of the double-take, the lie that tells the truth. Within a year of relocating to Santa Monica, he had his first New York exhibition. (Alas, none of those works sold either, so he really must be a genius!) In time, artists and critics and the fickle public cottoned-to his experimentation, perhaps, got the joke, often on them. Which funny or not still posed a fundamental question: Exactly what might art be other than what it had been?

The Way Out Is The Way Back • In 2007, to that fundamental question, the market dug deep in its pockets and produced an answer. Baldessari’s “Quality Material,” a canvas from his National City period, dated 1967-68, on which he printed this text (quality material - - - close inspection - - good workmanship. all combined in an effort to give you a perfect painting) sold at Christie’s for $4.4 million. Today, it’s worth double that.

What a minute. How’s that possible? Baldessari’s drive-by photos of corner gas stations, wry observations “stating the obvious,” a picture of a man standing in front of the trunk of a palm so that the palm seems to grow out of the man’s head, titled “Wrong,” were, by the 2000s, hanging in cutting-edge galleries and echoey art museums, bought at auction and displayed in the Park Avenue apartments of the hedge-fund horde. Who suddenly found value in his pieces? Guessing how the market works is pure divination. Still, once the critical cohort noted that Baldessari owed context and inspiration to the ridiculed backwater of National City, well, that assessment kick-started an awakening, which said, there was a plan in place, unbeknownst to every interest, including the artist, all along.

So such becomes his legacy. His hometown—and much less his LA getaway—shaped his creed that the blander the subject matter, the more the artist’s capture of that blandness startles us. Eventually, the idea is institutionalized: what in the present is not art and misunderstood may be art only the future lets us get, may be worth the investment. I find this intriguing, for it elevates—and has made permanent—the artist to seek marginalization as a rite of passage. In his own way, Baldessari had to self-marginalize his anarchic vision of National City, feel a failure for doing so, burn a good deal of the work he was right that few cared for (maybe even him), and leave his surroundings for the moneyed and academic opportunities in the artsy locus 100 miles north. There, he manifested recognition, in a sense, agenting his own reception. I wonder whether this self-representation, the hyper-individualizing of the artist as brand from the get-go (think Jeff Koons, Thomas Kinkade), wasn’t Baldessari’s discovery, which nowadays is de rigueur for the “influencer.”

Perhaps this life-art mirror, indebted to Duchamp and John Cage, rewired Baldessari as well, in the 1960s and throughout his career. As art critic Hugh Davies has written, National City is “no longer an artistic wilderness and certainly [the artist has become] a prophet in his own land.”4 Indeed, his recording its uneventuality and abandoning it for fame and fortune elsewhere is a grand paradox. And yet the grandness congeals only after his death when we see that the way out of National City is also the way back. To redefine home as exile means having both and neither.

Exile • For me, Baldessari’s “meaning” resides less in his art and more in his life, the gutsy use, elegant and inelegant, of his escape hatches. (I admit to my bias on how the artist’s autobiography creates the artist’s creative content, in part, because he illustrates my thesis—where he’s from and what he left says the most about his composition. I realize such may resemble a People magazine approach to cultural interpretation, but so be it.) Another fascination about Baldessari is that because of his love of the superficial, he’s comfortable being banished from the craftsman and aesthetic sides of art, landing, instead, between huckster and dilettante, a playfulness reminiscent of the Futurists and Fluxus. Think of the perseverance that artists had to have 50 years ago to be so far outside convention as one of few means to christen a new convention. 

Exile seems right—to leave or to be forced out. In his case, personal, geographical, artistic, a clumsily confounding artist-less art. Namesaked in his classic text-piece: Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work. Voilà, “a painting,” which is an artistic product since “no ideas have entered the work.” Hah! The very idea is that ideas have been “purged” so the result can only be “art.” Hah! Hah!

Once Baldessari became an “LA artist,” he announced that he “wasn’t an LA artist” and, instead, fancied himself a global creator. In his career, he left any group that critics repurposed him among, even if it meant dodging categories was his celebrity more so than his painting, famous for avoiding fame. What good was trading the obscurity of the hapless non-scenery in San Diego with the buddy-boy fraternity of the LA art world when the whole point was to shed identities, not to accrue them? Baldessari wanted to be everywhere and nowhere, conceptual and post-conceptual and nonconceptual. Rootlessness propounded theorylessness, and he did yeoman’s work resisting artistic tags—minimalist, deconstructionist, anti-hierarchical, obscurantist, significant, none of which fit until, later in the game, the art circles proclaimed him an exemplary postmodernist (the all-purpose tag for the many who have never fit). Which meant, as Christopher Butler writes, “It was not the object itself” that counted in the postmodernist’s work “but the conceptual processes behind it.”5 By all means, something must count. Such concepts seem to require an idea before an artist executes. Or the artist needed to think relentlessly about the making of the work while the work was being made, so the work didn’t sideline its idea and fall to improvisation, by definition, the absence of thought: first stroke, best stroke. The work had to be the end result of an inner process that thought it into evidentiary being and, at the same time, seemed whimsically of the moment.

Much art, at least, the derring-do, has this quality of exile—to abscond and become itself because it’s been uprooted. It has left the realm of what it was or should have been, for those things were too limiting. Baldessari violated what the artist and critic had agreed to, namely, that prevalent images and techniques and membership in a historical continuity constituted the content. From that he was exiled or he self-exiled. Take your pick. And there’s a tasty third slice: Baldessari first made a lot of stuff, then jettisoned himself and the pieces (by burning most of it) to enter a new naked realm and meander without an idea where he was except elsewhere. 

It’s also exilic to flee, that is, prior to being forced out, deracinated. Realizing (often too late) that the authorities are coming for your removal. The Jews exiled from their native land in Palestine and in their adopted home, Central Europe, millennia later. Adam and Eve banished from the Garden. In some religions, a people spend their lives in exile from their true home, Heaven for many, a Rest Area from which they came and to which they’ll return. (God sent them out of Paradise and onto a baleful earth so they’d appreciate the little house on the prairie once they returned, conditionally, of course.) Add Dante, exiled from Florence, or Pasternak, exiled within Russia, for the ripest of sins: poetry against church and state. To be expelled, sent off, isled like Napoleon or Papillon. To be expatriated. Or, contrarily, to be exiled for treason and wander the seas by ship like the man without a country.

And another meaning for exile: to thin, to attenuate, to reduce: to become meager, scanty, lean, barren, poor, to disembowel. The OED brings this to life: “an actual division of the whole into so many subtile, exile, invisible particles.” A whole can be minced and produce not a loss of matter but matter’s far-flung disaggregation and disbursement. Broken away from its original constitution. A scattering. The Big Bang expending matter into an expansively exiling universe. 

Attending this sense of dispersal is the transference of reality to appearance, a concept whose loveliness Baldessari might have approved: “It is not . . . the paper that is, in fact, the substitute for money but something still more exile; the promise . . . stamped upon it.”

That an entity can have a representative value that is exiled from itself yet still, somehow, retain its value. A painting sells for $1 million, its worth no longer intrinsic, if it ever was. Its worth resides solely in its exchange—the canvas as a commodity for the person who possesses the money to buy and own it: provenance. 

Enlarge that to the artist who must leave his home/hometown for recognition, a career, or just raw adventure. A constituent necessity within that home/hometown is missing. The artist wants it and espies it elsewhere, in the gallery promises of Los Angeles or New York or Houston, of a savvy market and its critical buzz. And there I find the final lesson of Baldessari: the place from which he is exiled or self-exiles must exist as less than, as a reverse elsewhere. Once he got to LA and felt some degree less homeless, of settledness, he realized that ending up there, not here, was his fate. The fate of the pushed out was to begin pushing himself. 

Why has no one but me, a literary critic, made this point?

I don’t get it.

Journalist, book/music critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson is the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry (Swallow Press). He has also written The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a 24-year staff writer of longform journalism for the San Diego Reader, a seven-year book review editor for River Teeth, and a former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican. www.thomaslarson.com

I discovered the poem “Night Feed” by the Irish poet Eavan Boland too late. I had already weaned my youngest child and endured those hours of nether-world isolation and groggy mornings without Boland’s benediction. The late Boland’s poem describes waking at dawn to feed her infant daughter. Rereading it long after my children have grown brings me a new understanding of those hours cradling them.

I have reached the stage of life, like arriving at a waypoint on a road trip without a map, where I know I’m nearly three-quarters of the way to the end, and may be closer than that. I ponder how my life might have unfolded differently, freed from the care of children. What might I have accomplished, what books written, with more time for myself? There are times when I grieve that it took me so long to come to the page.

“Night Feed” brings me back to the peace of the gray dawn nursings, when I was swathed by the ghosts of others’ dreams, soothed by the rustle of wind through the oak outside. Like the poet, I conjured a perfect world. I gazed into my daughter’s somnolent face and imagined that she would grow into adulthood unscathed. I envisioned a time when she would gather my tired body in her arms, prop a cup to my lips, and hold me as I fall back into sleep, while looking out at the oak, deep in her own dreams.

Boland concludes her poem when the feeding ends:

And we begin

The long fall from grace.

I tuck you in.

Boland went on to publish many volumes of poetry, but we were both to learn that the road can be long, potholed, and serpentine.

Well, I knew as a young woman that I wanted to be an ancestor one day. Boland reminds me that during those quiet nights holding my offspring, I was doing important work—strengthening the umbilical of my foremothers. And when my granddaughter’s granddaughter awakens in the night, I will cradle her, too. Time is illusion. The stories will come.

Eavan Aisling Boland (1944-2020) was an Irish poet, author, and professor. “Night Feed” appears in her book Night Feed (1982), and in the book An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. In 1994 she was the writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin.

Teresa H. Janssen is a retired teacher with four adult children. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Zyzzyva, Parabola, Chautauqua, Emrys, and other journals. Her debut novel, The Ways of Water, is forthcoming November 2023 from She Writes Press.

As a young man, I knew exactly where all three of A. P. Ryder's paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These pieces, diminutive even for easel paintings, were like three odd jewels almost hidden in a corner of the American wing. I would go there to study these tortured-looking paintings. They were like nothing else in the museum, their skins cracked and oozing oil from thick brushstrokes, with paint globs in some parts and scraped down to the gesso in others.  I didn’t know much about technique at the time, and these were the only Ryders I had ever seen, I don’t know that I understood then the effect of light he was trying to capture, but the paintings had done their job and grabbed my attention. 

Ryder’s The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) is possibly the most notorious painting in a body of work known for being odd by a painter whose career and life remain somewhat of a mystery. He was active for about 30 years and yet generated fewer than 200 paintings. Regardless, he gained both commercial and critical success and was sought out long after he retreated into a self-imposed hermitage in his New York apartment. Death on a Pale Horse was the last major work he painted and perhaps the reason he stopped painting all together.  

Alpert Pinkham Ryder was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1847, just about the time Herman Melville was making the town infamous by writing it into his forthcoming masterpiece Moby-Dick. Little is known about Ryder’s childhood or early life until his family uprooted and moved to New York City in 1867 to join his brother who was having great success there as a restaurateur.

He was apprenticed to portraitist and miniature painter William Edgar Marshall from 1870-73, 1874-75. At the same time, he studied at the National Academy of Design where he exhibited his first work in 1873. Ryder's first known works were much like those of his contemporaries: open-air landscapes where men worked with their animals, appearing minuscule against the immensity of wild nature all about them. 

In 1877 Ryder traveled to Europe for the first time. When he returned, the influence of contemporary symbolism he saw in France became evident in his work, which also had become less vibrant in color but more nuanced in tone. Some of his pieces from this period are almost monochrome. Back in New York, he helped found the Society of American Artists with whom he showed his work from 1878 - 1887. 

By the mid-1880s his paintings began to focus on scenes from literature, operas, and Bible verses. These dramatic pieces used elements from the Barbizon School that was popular in France at the time and the Dutch tonalists, but his style was becoming ever more unique. He experimented with layering heavy paint over still-wet coats of paint beneath. He scraped and layered his paintings, searching for a way to create a luminosity that emanates from within the painting. This technique was perhaps most effective in the nocturnal seascapes under the moonlight for which he is probably best known. 

In 1895 Ryder painted The Race Track ( Death on a Pale Horse), which would have marked a new period for him if it hadn’t been his last major work. The canvas size is larger by half than his usual work. The paint body was slightly thinner, but he was still employing the techniques he had worked and reworked to create the haunting light of the piece. 

He painted the work in effigy of a friend, a waiter who served in his brother’s restaurant, who committed suicide after losing his life savings at a horse race, a sure thing, that like most sure things, wasn't.

 “…[the waiter] told me that he had saved up $500 and that he had placed every penny of it on Hanover winning this race. The next day the race was run, and, as racegoers will probably remember, Hanover came in third. I was immediately reminded that my friend the waiter had lost all his money. That dwelt in my mind, as for some reason it impressed me very much, so much so that I went around to my brother’s hotel for breakfast the next morning and was shocked to find my waiter friend had shot himself the evening before. This fact formed a cloud over my mind that I could not throw off, and 'The Race Track' is the result.” In the artist’s own words as reprinted in McBride, ​“News and Comment,” quoted in Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1989.

The racetrack centered in the painting's almost otherwise barren landscape disappears over the horizon in an infinite loop. The course is surrounded by a shabby fence that is already broken open just at the viewer's eye level where a fat serpent hovers, flicking its tongue towards the almost skeletal rider on its pale horse. The painting is rich with symbolism. Death rides the pale horse forever, always just on the other side of a fragile border which is broken open by the serpent of temptation who guides the viewer towards the track and into the reach of Death's great sweeping scythe. The only tree that stands is dead, perhaps a farm long abandoned fuses with the forest in the background under what seems an indifferent sun that casts a cold light. 

The death of his friend must have affected him deeply for this to be his last major painting, one that he worked on for as many as fifteen years. Building it up, scraping it down, submerging it in tin-lined drawers full of oils as he did with so many of his pieces. From 1900 on he did little more than rework old pieces as he slipped into a kind of self-imposed exile among his rooms. 

Still, his paintings remained popular and he was a venerated personality in the art world. Younger painters and artworld hangers-on sought him out and he welcomed them into his home, cluttered and filthy as it was reported to be. 

In 1913 he was honored by his peers to hang ten pieces at the now-famous 1913 New York Armory show, a show that established New York’s place among the cities of Europe where great art was being made and could be viewed. It was the first major show of modern art in the United States and resulted in a lawsuit that defined modern art in terms of tax duty compared to appliances, a judgment which import-exporters still go by. 

By 1915 Ryder's health was failing and he ceased working altogether. In 1917 he died among friends who took care of him at the end of his life. Ryder’s popularity waned in general postwar, as American art took on a grander scale, even though many of those artists were inspired by his work. For painters, though he has always been there to study. Like some sort of alchemist, he transformed his works into living things with sagging skins that cracked, bunched, and split, releasing trickles of amber from their wounds. There’s no doubt that his paintings look different today from when he painted them because of their never-drying properties, but they still retain the ethereal light he sought with his technique. 

John McMahon is a freelance writer/former art world schmuck who now lives on a beach in Thailand.

My husband came home from the field and the first thing he wanted to do was take a hot shower. It was winter in North Carolina, maybe December, and there wasn't any snow on the ground, but it was cold, the kind of cold you don't want to be out in for four days straight, but he had been. The Army had said so. Gabriel came in with camo paint still all over his face. The way the olive greens and blacks had dried made his whole face look like a bruise. We kissed; a reunion, one of many. He was home again. He wanted to shower. Of course he did. Go shower, I said. Off he went. A few minutes later I heard something shatter in the bathroom.  

"Everything OK?" I called out from the kitchen. 

He opened the door a crack. His shirt was off. "Don't freak out," he said.  

I saw pieces of his tungsten wedding ring all over the floor. The ring had been too cold for too long. It rolled off the counter and broke. Gabriel knows full well how fast my mind can move. Give me two strands of anything and I'll knit them into a story. A shattered ring? A broken marriage! Divorce! A tell-tale sign! Something worse...someone else?  

"Stop," he said. He had caught me red-handed. "It doesn't mean anything." 

As a lover of narrative, as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, I'm lightning quick to want to match up metaphor with meaning. Synchronicity with story. I see life as art. I see art as life; it's this tailored congruency. I translate one into the other and back again. 

Safe to say, Gabriel and I see the world quite differently. When I get into one of my "loops," overlaying a narrative lens onto our everyday living, Gabriel will say, "A rock is just a rock." But I have a rock in my desk, this piece of frankincense, rough-cut and xanthous, I kept from a writing exercise in grad school. I remember our teacher, Elissa Schappell, passing them out. Amber, Susan, Lillian, Miranda, Melanie, and Katrine were around the table, too. I remember the square layout of our classroom, the type of chair (jet black with a bendy back), and where I sat (in the seat furthest from the door with my back to a pair of radius windows looking out onto a Columbia quad). Details are everything to me. They animate. They color. They light the fuse of art. They make any story "go."

My desk drawer is full of Post-it notes with ideas that I'm still working on, neon pencil erasers, recipes for elderberry syrup, a poem I wrote about my mom but never showed her or even typed up, a deck of tarot cards, and a quotable card that says, "calm down." To me, everything contains a story, a history, be it a sweater, a bookshelf, a plant, a muffin tin. I save voicemails, letters from friends, screenshots, college transcripts. Right now, I have 32,209 photos on my phone and 1,269 videos. I never considered myself to be an archivist; I consider myself a writer. I want to capture every detail. I want to remember it all. But how do I make sense of my love of detail? How do I make art from my overwhelm? 

*****

Before I graduated from my MFA program, I submitted my completed thesis and met with two fiction writers. We had moved to North Carolina, so my meeting was virtual, on Zoom. Gabriel and I had planned to see family at the lake, and I considered our drive out there, after my final conference, my "finish line," the end to my MFA experience. I imagined driving west on I-40 with a powerful royal feeling emanating from my body. I'd now be a Writer with nothing but potential before me. But that was not the case. The meeting did not go well. I was in low spirits. I was depressed. Maybe, I thought, I was "too sensitive" to do this writing thing. Maybe my love of details would never line up "right." I couldn't see my path forward, and to me this was the same thing as saying there was no path. For months, honestly, even years after that conference, before I got too far in a creative project, I convinced myself I was blessed with foresight: I could see every possible roadblock in sight. Oh wasn't it wonderful to save myself from even having to try? 

*****

But how do I make sense of my love of detail? How do I make art from my overwhelm? And, how do I step over my self-pity and fear? I look to the masters. I think of Natalie Goldberg, the best-selling author of Writing Down the Bones, and how she found her own way to build a writing practice. "Every time I thought of a topic or idea, any flash at all, even if it seemed to have no connection to writing—the apples in fall at Nora Zimmerman's orchard in Talpa or the story I'd heard about the man who ate a car in India—I jotted it down at the back of my notebook." When she sat to write, she picked a few topics, listed them at the top of her page, and wrote for two hours. Structure is what saves her. Structure is what gives her a boundary to play within. What does my structure look like? What is yours? 

I, too, find calm with the structure of time. I, too, use a marker of two hours (I set a timer) to make progress and cover some ground. I try to write from seven to nine AM. I don't beat myself up when I can't. And if I want to keep going, if I can keep going, I do. 

In my life, I continue to play with connection and context. I can't not. I love writing. I love making stories. When the details do all match up, as Richard Hugo says in his essay “The Triggering Town,” "There's [...] an exhilaration that can't be explained to anyone who has not experienced it." It's electric. My work is not in pleasing others with what I write. My work is not even in fully understanding what manifests through me. My work is in the details, of gathering them as I go, collecting them in my basket, and showing up at the page with all of them to see what shines. My work is the writing. Making the edits and moving sections around. It's like quilt making, seeing which pieces fit and how all the elements come together. Needless to say, while I'm working, if I stay focused, I am nothing but my absolute happiest. 

And what about the wedding ring? Gabriel got another one. In fact, there have been many. None of them the same ring I put on his finger at our small wedding ceremony near the rowboats in Central Park, but the ring is not the marriage. The marriage is the marriage. I see that all so clearly now. 

Erin Pesut studied writing at Warren Wilson College and earned her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, Whale Road Review, West Trestle Review, Poetry South, Camas, and HeartWood Literary Magazine, among others. She was a finalist for CRAFT's inaugural Creative Nonfiction Award. Born in South Carolina, she now lives in Vermont. www.erinpesut.com

I always wanted to be a writer, a famous writer of course, but just couldn't sit still. After playing baseball for twelve years, I needed something and I was finding out something. I needed something to keep me moving and found out I had no qualms about dancing.

It's one of those things when you ask, "Why this thing?" and then you look back and realize you were doing “this thing” your whole life. And so with me. In high school, I would get on the dance floor in redneck Oklahoma City bars and dance solo improvisations while my buddies watched from bar stools, and unknown to me, were probably protecting my ass from the rednecks.

I was swirling the drain in San Francisco in 1976 when I met my first wife, a ballet dancer taking classes at San Francisco Ballet. It was on Van Ness at that time. I fell in love with her and ballet. We moved to Santa Barbara that year, and I still see that line of Eucalyptus as you enter Santa Barbara as the gateway to my life, to awakening from the slumber of a non-artistic life.

Dance saved my life, and in that sense, art was the opening to an authentic life. I was 19 then, I am 66 now, still dancing, still performing. I never gave up on dance because dance never gave up on me. Do things happen for a reason? Bet on it! I raised a family, worked full time, and danced. That's the way I had to do it. I wasn't paid much for teaching, dancing, and choreography, but I did it anyway, because it wasn't about money, ever. Dance saved my life because through this medium I was able to live a life without regret, never having to say, “I wish I had done.”

And to the naysayers and the naysayer in you, I say don't say nay, say yes–to yourself, to life, to the joy that comes from doing what you love no matter what. It is all you have that is real, everything else is pretend.

Russell Dawson began dancing ballet and modern at 19. Now 66, he has managed to dance and perform his whole life, even today, after raising a family and working full time.

“I am charmingly original. I am delightfully refreshing. I am startlingly bohemian. I am quaintly interesting—the while in my sleeve I may be smiling and smiling—and a villain.”

Mary MacLane, the author of this confident prose, was born a Canadian, in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1881, but her family decided to migrate to the States. They would eventually settle in Butte, Montana, which would form the basis of her nickname “The Wild Woman of Butte.” MacLane would identify as an American for the rest of her life. Generally dissatisfied with the isolated and unstimulating existence of her small community and lower middle-class family, MacLane in her adolescence and young adulthood seized upon scraps of happiness found in highbrow literature and long, solo country walks during which she mused on various philosophical queries. These intense inner debates were meticulously documented in a diary she wrote under the working title of I Await the Devil’s Coming.

MacLane’s publisher, fearing the inevitable backlash of this provocative declaration on the cover of a book, changed the title to the more subdued The Story of Mary MacLane without consulting MacLane, who most certainly would have protested this distillation of her individuality. Only in 2013 was it republished under its original and far more intriguing first title. The book, upon its first release in 1902, was an astounding bestseller, and the profits allowed MacLane to escape rural America and dive headfirst into a fast-living, bohemian city life, which she did so with swashbuckling gusto.

At the heart of Mary McLane’s writing style is a profound, unashamed love of the self. She considered herself the most fascinating possible subject she could write about and committed to that notion throughout her career. Her views on everything, from history to sexuality, were mutinous against conventionality. Emperor Napoleon was a brilliant tactician and opportunist, not a tyrant. Her romantic, bisexual feelings for another woman were perfectly legitimate and acceptable, not a glitch in the natural order. And why worship a stern and unforgiving God when you could worship the more attractive and accommodating Devil instead? She went as far as to admit that the Devil was, in her eyes, the only suitable husband for her. “And so here I stand in the midst of Nothingness waiting and longing for the Devil, and he doesn’t come,” she boldly writes. “I feel a choking, strangling, frenzied feeling of waiting—oh, why doesn’t my Happiness come!”

I Await the Devil’s Coming is not so much a typical memoir, relating everyday events in chronological order with occasional insight, but an unabashed mental adventure in which the author, brazenly throwing open the doors of her mind, invites readers into what can only be described as a wild psychological dance party she’s hosting for fun. This form of self-preoccupation and self-marketing can be seen in the titles of her other published works as well, which always include her name. Whether a book or an article, at center stage is Mary MacLane: “Mary MacLane Soliloquizes on Scarlet Fever,” “Mary MacLane Meets the Vampire on the Isle of Treacherous Delights,” “Mary MacLane on Marriage,” and I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days are just a few examples of her very personalized, trademarked output.

MacLane also dabbled in filmmaking and was, of course, the star of a now-lost film titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me. Based on her previous article of the same name, the film daringly depicts MacLane’s saucy real-life love affairs in the style of a confession made directly to the audience. Ironically, this gutsy experiment was (reportedly) a silent film. Cinematic technology simply wasn’t ready for the full raw power of MacLane’s voice and delivery. Perhaps that is why her film career never took off.

Tragically, the flame of her success eventually died out, and Mary MacLane died in obscurity. She was discovered dead in a Chicago motel room in 1929 at the age of forty-eight, ravaged and ultimately defeated by poor health and the debilitating after effects of her libertine, devil-may-care lifestyle. Though she repeated her own name incessantly in the literary world, it has been almost forgotten. Mention her and you’ll get, “Who was Mary MacLane?” as a response, rather than the more appropriate, “Who was Mary MacLane?”

However, some modern creative minds still draw inspiration from her work. In 2020, Plain Bad Heroines, by American writer Emily M. Danforth, was published. Half of the novel, set in 1902, follows two young women who emulate Mary MacLane’s example by exploring their own rebellious intellectualism and lesbian attraction to one another. As critic Jessica Crispin writes in her introduction to I Await the Devil’s Coming: “But reading her now, we see that Mary MacLane was always more than just an outrage. She speaks to the displaced. The thwarted, the unfamous, the trapped in circumstance, the girl filled with impossible longings.”

I Await the Devil’s Coming is available for purchase on Amazon, but it may be more of a tribute to MacLane’s memory to venture out to your local bookshops and scour the shelves for a copy. As you will discover from reading her work, MacLane was never one to sit still and wait for good things to come to her. She knew from a young age that you have to tap into your willpower and summon them, just like you would the devil.

E.R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Fascinated by women's literary history, her biographical articles on female writers have been published by Jstor Daily, The Archive, Early Bird Books, and The Calvert Journal. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry. 

Ochre, orchid, and olive – more colors than a 64-pack of Crayolas. Freight trains, once the lifeblood of American commerce, course the veins of our nation. Their brilliance stands out against summer’s drying crops. Ribbons of color trace the landscape lacing through tunnels across America. The colors of the boxcars blur together as I traverse the collage of states we call the USA at 75 miles per hour.

Gray – the color of quandary. Why am I surprised to see them here in America’s mid-section? My customary air travel takes me above them. I have forgotten. I am driving across the continent to watch the Yankees play ball. These roving galleries of color are not listed in my AAA TourBook. They’re unexpected; still, still I am glad they amaze my spirit.

Black, brick and brown – the various hues painted upon the rust-colored canvases only as high as the arm can reach. Like paint swatches in The Home Depot. Vandalism, I suppose, but somehow, lovely, alluring, belonging here.

Tan, teal, and tangerine – designed on rectangle shapes that remind me of bolts of fabric in the yardage store. They tease the thought.

Peach, plum, and periwinkle – artwork reminiscent of the kaleidoscope from my childhood – I welcome their intrusion on the landscape.

Mint, maize, and mahogany – like the patches of a giant quilt. Today it rides through Oregon, tomorrow Montana, next week Kansas, then Kentucky. Only restricted by the rails it sits on. More offerings than the eye can capture – always changing, always moving, always captivating.

Salmon, shamrock, and silver – boxcars more colorful than a Norman Rockwell, more chaotic than an Edvard Munch, but art just the same; art that is an image from today’s culture. Speaking in the voice of the unemployed, the underemployed, the lonely, the bored and the desolate, of unrecognized talent and potential, of dormant energy and untapped imagination. Picturing both hope and despair.

Canary, carnation, and copper – let it ride the rails. Displaying great promise across the land. Color America with expectation and optimism!

Mason K. Brown is an author of inspirational non-fiction and humor. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, but travels the world collecting water and fodder for her stories.

She was born on May 8th, 1929, and when she exited the world fifty-five years later, she would leave behind a bizarre legacy in the school of New Age literature, a genre of Western writing, beginning in the 1960s, that documented experimental religious and spiritual practices. A great mystery still surrounds her death. Did she, by passing on into the next realm, unite at last with the ghostly specter of “Seth,” her supposed celestial possessor and mentor and the true mastermind behind her best literary works, or did “Seth,” perhaps an entirely made-up entity concocted to publish and sell more books, simply die with her?

The American writer, psychic, and spirit medium Dorothy Jane Roberts was born and raised under circumstances that groomed her to reject a traditional set of beliefs in favor of a form of spirituality that allowed her to enjoy the agency denied to her in her childhood. An invalid, suicidal, and emotionally abusive mother and her own poor health plagued her unhappy upbringing in Saratoga Springs, New York. With her mother, who was her lone parent, she never felt safe or cherished, and she was forced to take on a caretaker role at a young age. Though she received some stability and support from some local religious figures, Roberts would ultimately abandon her faith in God and Catholicism after the death of her beloved grandfather when she was nineteen. She had a mind more inclined to science and the mystic than conventional Christianity. She also had an unquenchable thirst to write. At the time of her grandfather’s death, she was attending Skidmore College on a prestigious poetry scholarship. She had been honing her technique since age five, both as a creative outlet and as a coping mechanism for her trauma, and according to her memorial on Find a Grave, she would bravely seek out help and inspiration from the Yaddo art colony as a child.

As an adult, she found help and inspiration for her writing from an odder, more unorthodox source. It happened on the night of December 2, 1963, when Roberts and her second husband, Robert (Rob) Fabian Butts, also an artist, were playing around with a Ouija board for research purposes. Roberts claimed that before their experiment she had already been experiencing unnerving psychic revelations in the form of scientific concepts. The voice whispering in her mind and consequentially expanding it identified himself, through the Ouija board, as “Seth.” From that day on, Seth and Roberts’s existences were intertwined. Roberts was the puppet, and Seth the puppeteer. Seth spoke through Roberts and used her as his host. Through Roberts Seth dictated to Butts, who happily took on the role of secretary for his wife’s extraordinary demon, a series of texts on science, philosophy, and metaphysics that would come to be known as the Seth Material. (The Seth Material is available for purchase in volumes, each labeled A Seth Book.) A cult following soon sprung up around Roberts and Seth, and fascinated onlookers attended ESP (extrasensory perception) sessions to hear Seth convey dialogues through Roberts, as if he were a regular lecturer. Seth was also a fiction writer and a poet. If he were real, both he and Roberts can be given credit for being versatile writers.

Of course, Roberts had, and still has, her skeptics. There are those who, understandably, believe she had some sort of mental illness, such as dissociative identity disorder. There are those who insist she was a fraud, and that “Seth” was a ridiculous gimmick to supplement what some considered a mediocre writing style in order to obtain fame. Others who have faith in the occult are willing to accept that Roberts bonded with an ingenious, kindred, quite literal spirit, but question Roberts’s ability to transcribe her “friend’s” words in such detail due to the complicated intricacies of mediumship (which often don’t allow such intimacy between the summoner and the summoned). But then there are those on the opposite side of the spectrum, who not only fully maintain that Roberts could channel Seth’s ideas through her body but consider Seth’s scientific theories seriously as well. One such loyal follower, Paul M. Helfrich, Ph.D., seemingly brushes off Seth’s strange origins in his essay “Seth on ‘The Origins of the Universe and of the Species’” before commencing a complete deconstruction of Seth’s take on the creation myth, all the while respecting Seth as a physicist and philosopher in his own right. In the essay, Roberts herself is barely mentioned, and is interpreted merely as Seth’s convenient mouthpiece.

“To his credit,” Helfrich writes. “Seth constantly works around the inherent limitations of English and its penchant for linear cognitive constructs that deal with objects and processes in space and time. Seth uses simple metaphors to explain complex concepts like the emergence of Mind into Matter, Timelessness into Time, Spacelessness into Space, dream oceans, plants, and bodies into physical oceans, plants, and bodies.”

One particular blogger remembers Roberts with fond affection, commemorating her as a remarkable and unforgettable eccentric separate from her Seth persona. “Without putting down my intent,” Roberts’s former follower Richard Kendall recounts, “Jane explained to me that while she had her highs, her life was not an endless series of peak experiences but was filled with ups and downs like anyone else’s life.” According to Kendall, who regarded her as a teacher and a friend, Roberts never aimed to become something like a sect leader or a God on Earth, but rather a writer who just so happened to have an uncanny connection with the Other Side. Whether or not Seth was real or counterfeit remains up to debate and interpretation, but those who want to believe will continue to believe.

E.R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Fascinated by women's literary history, her biographical articles on female writers have been published by Jstor Daily, The Archive, Early Bird Books, and The Calvert Journal. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry. 

Would you pay $5 a month to stream original content from independent performing artists and performing arts organizations? All it would cost you — $5. For that $5 a month you would be introduced to performers, artists, and arts organizations all over the country. You could watch their videos, hear their original recordings, and share your own work.

I’m talking about turning Raft into a platform for discovering the performing arts. So in addition to reading about the arts and art history, you could watch and listen to the people who are making work right now.

Raft’s mission is threefold: to re-imagine critical writing about the arts; to make American art history more accessible and discoverable; and to help artists build sustainable careers. Let’s zero in on that last piece.

Today it’s harder than ever to make it as a creative. Sure, there are plenty of tools for making and getting your work out there, as they say. But the curation is lacking. The big streaming platforms are popularity contests. The nonprofit arts are not popular.

Over the past two years I have been working on a tool for selling and gating content online. It’s called Monetized. Building Monetized taught me a lot about the payments ecosystem. There are dozens of new companies and emerging technologies in this space, all aiming to solve the problem of getting creators paid for their online content. Substack, the platform we use to produce this magazine, is one of these companies. It allows writers and publishers to get paid directly from their subscribers. (We haven’t turned on paid subscriptions for Raft yet. It’s estimated that only 1-2% of free subscribers for any Substack will go paid. But we might try that in the future.)

Another emerging technology is called Web Monetization, an open protocol and proposed standard for the web that allows for streaming payments.

Starting this month, Raft is featuring a course on Web Monetization. You can find it in the navigation bar up top. This course was funded by Grant for the Web.

The beauty of Web Monetization lies in its simplicity. You pay $5 a month to a payment processor called Coil, and Coil sends your money in the form of micropayments to creators according to how much time you spend enjoying their content. You pay Coil; Coil pays creators.

In theory it’s a simple solution to the problem of monetization. In practice, it’s proving more difficult to implement. For starters, content creators must have a large number of Web Monetization members coming to their site.

So I put the question to you: Would you pay $5 a month for access to a site for streaming and purchasing performing arts content? Building such a site is within our capabilities. What I want to know: Will people use it?

Raft Community Zoom meeting: Tuesday. February 7 at 6 PM Eastern.

Tell me what role Raft plays in your life. What more would you like it to be? Would you like it to be a streaming platform? I can also answer any questions about Web Monetization and help you get started with it.

Register for the Zoom session here. Registration is required.

Web Monetization for the Arts started with questions that arose during the Covid 19 pandemic. With performance calendars cancelled and gigs disrupted, the pandemic was devastating for freelance artists and small performing arts groups. Shut out from in-person performance, many artists took their work online. Some chose to stream live performances via Facebook or YouTube. Others began offering online courses.  

Web Monetization for the Arts started with some questions: Will this change be permanent? Will performing artists continue to put original content online? Is that the new expectation for artists? If it is, knowing how much work generating original digital content can be and how little monetary reward for it there is, how can we help artists develop financially viable and sanity-sustaining online content strategies? 

Web Monetization for the Arts Survey

In spring 2022 we set out to survey freelance classical musicians, independent performing artists, and small performing arts organizations about their digital content strategies. We contacted thousands of artists and organizations. We wanted to know how many were making original digital content. How were they sharing it? What were they using it for? What were they optimizing for? Impressions? Shares? Engagement? Monetization? None of the above?

Our survey also sought to gauge respondents’ familiarity with Web Monetization, an internet protocol that allows for streaming payments. More than just “making money online,” Web Monetization is a new way of putting content online and sidesteps the tradeoff between monetization and visibility creators face with paywalls. We wanted to see if our audience was aware of it. 

Over a few months we received responses from groups all over the United States, representing small to midsize organizations. The majority of respondents (69%) were individual artists/creators. Most (72%) were musicians. Eighty percent of respondents stated that they create original digital content.

We asked respondents if they had received revenue from this online content in the past two years. 35% said Yes. 65% said No. 

When asked how they monetize online content, the top answers were donation, ticketing/sales, and none of the above. 

When asked how they measure the effectiveness of their digital content, respondents gave equal weight to acquisition, interaction, and reach (views) at 18% and conversion, publicity, and revenue at 10%-12%. Twelve percent of respondents stated that they don’t measure effectiveness. 

Concerns about posting content online were also evenly spread between concerns about generating income, fraud/theft of content, infringing on intellectual property of others, and receiving proper credit for their work.

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.

What does the 2022 Web Monetization for the Arts survey teach us?

No singular digital content strategy emerged from our survey results. Indeed, artists are choosing a variety of digital platforms and tools, and using a range of performance indicators to define “success.” One surmises that every artist and organization is creating their own best practice.

These practices can be arranged on a spectrum, with visibility and monetization at opposite ends. On the visibility end, art shared online is a public good, free for all. It serves to inspire, challenge, beautify the world. It might get you some followers or future sales, but that is not its primary purpose. On the monetization end, the art shared online is a private intellectual property. It is also labor, and like all other forms of labor, it should be paid.

Here are two comments we received from survey respondents:

• Artists should stop putting their work on streaming platforms because they rip artists off.

• Let’s not talk about money. We’re artists, not businesses. 

In the first comment, the current monetization scheme used by streaming platforms is considered unfair. In the second, the relevance of monetization is called into question. 

Again, no two artists are the same. They will choose different strategies depending on where they are in their career, what they are working on, their artistic medium, their support base. But the conundrum remains: Today’s technology makes it easier than ever before to put work online. At the same time, it’s never been harder to build a financially sustainable career as an artist. 

So. If there were a way to monetize your content, while keeping it visible for a wide audience, would you do it?

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.

Web Monetization. Browser API that allows the creation of a payment stream from a user agent to a content creator. 

API. Application Programming Interface. Software interface that allows two computer programs to communicate with one another. Connects two computers. A user interface creates a way for a computer to talk to a person. A software interface allows computers to talk to one another. 

Coil. Coil is a for-profit membership service that streams micropayments to content creators according to members’ content consumption or attention. Coil essentially provides payment support for Web Monetization. Coil charges members $5 a month. 

Micropayment. Just as it sounds, this is a financial transaction involving small sums, even under  $1. The term originated before the web and was used to discuss paying copyright holders for content.

Internet Protocol (“IP”). A protocol, or set of rules, governing how data are routed between networks. Protocols define how networked computers communicate with one another and Internet Protocol defines how networks communicate with each other. 

Interledger Protocol (“ILP”). A protocol for sending packets of money across payment networks or ledgers. It is neutral – not tied to any company, currency, or network – and is designed to work across any type of ledger. 

Digital Wallet. App or software that allows users to make transactions electronically. Cash app, Paypal, and Venmo are all examples of digital wallets.

ILP-enabled wallet. A digital wallet that is compatible with the Interledger protocol. Uphold and Gatehub offer ILP-enabled wallets. 

Payment Pointer. A unique identifier used by Web Monetization to move money from one user to another. It’s like a bank account embedded on web pages that Web Monetized sites use to identify the destination of  funds sent to content creators. 

Payment Streaming. Just as it sounds, payment streaming is the transfer of funds from a digital content consumer to the digital content creator. The longer a consumer spends on the creator’s site, the more micropayments are streamed. 

Digital Platform. A business term. The marketplace created by the information and content exchanged on a software application. There are content platforms (YouTube), social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter), and crowdfunding platforms (Patreon, GoFundMe). where the community is a vital part of the business structure.

Web3. A loose term meant to indicate a shift in the architecture of the web and a move towards decentralization and blockchain technology. You can think of this generally as a move from platforms to protocols. Web3 tools allow users to access protocols and bypass centralized platforms. 

Browser Extension. Software module for customizing a web browser. Some well-known browser extensions include Adobe Acrobat, AdBlock, Grammarly, Google Calendar, and MetaMask.  

Plugin. Computer software that adds new functions to a host program without altering the host program itself. Plugins can be added and removed. WordPress users will be familiar with WordPress plugins, which, when added to the WordPress site, make available a variety of new functions. 

Open Source. Pertains to software whose computer source code is made freely available. Open source is the opposite of closed source programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Oftentimes the copyright holder for the code will couple a permissive Open Source license—such as a Creative Commons license—with Open Source software so that users have the right to use, study, change, and distribute the software without needing permission from the creator. Collaborative projects such as Linux and Chromium—the software that runs the Chrome web browser—are released as open source projects. 

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.

With a Coil account you will be able to see how Coil recognizes Web Monetized content and notifies you that you are streaming payments to the content creator. 

Getting started with Coil requires two steps:

1. Sign up for a Coil Account

2. Add the Coil extension to your browser. 

Go to www.coil.com .

To become a member, you supply a credit card to sign up for the $5-a-month membership. Membership is charged automatically each month, unless you cancel. 

In order for Coil to recognize Web Monetized content on your browser, you need to install the Coil extension. On mobile, you can also use Puma, the Web Monetized browser for iOS and Android. 

To install the Coil extension in your Chrome browser, follow the steps on Coil’s homepage. 

The browser extension is available for desktop and Samsung devices: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Samsung Internet, Microsoft Edge, and Brave browser. 

We’ll go over installing the browser extension for Google Chrome. 

1. Click on the icon for Google Chrome. This takes you to the Chrome Web Store. 

2. Press Add to Chrome and you’re done. 

Once Coil is installed, you can browse Web Monetized content and know that you are paying the content creators while you visit. With Coil installed on your browser or in the Puma browser, web monetized sites will appear ad-free. 

At coil.com/discover you will find a list of recommended web monetized sites along with special benefits for Coil users. 

How do you know you’re streaming payments? Look for the Coil icon in your browser. (You might need to click on the Extensions tab to see all your installed extensions.) If Web Monetization is enabled, the icon will have a green dot on it. Click on the Coil icon in your browser. You’ll get a pop-up that tells you if the site is Web Monetized or not.

Keep in mind: Coil does NOT create a paywall. Content is still available for viewing online. Only Coil subscribers will be streaming payments to the content creators.

Test your skills.

It is possible to create exclusive content only for Web Monetization members. If you have signed up for a Coil membership, visit this page with premium, Web Monetization-only content at Monetized.

If you can see the video, you have successfully added Coil to your browser. 

If you have Coil, when you come to this page you will be able to play a short video. If not, you will be instructed to sign up for Web Monetization. In this way you can direct your audience to sign up for Web Monetization.

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.

Let’s go over setting up an ILP-enabled digital wallet. Once you have an ILP-enabled digital wallet, you will be able access your Interledger payment pointer. You need the payment pointer to set up your streaming payments from Coil. 

Currently, your options for the ILP-enabled digital wallet are Uphold and GateHub. In order to receive your payments in fiat currency, that is, not in cryptocurrency, you should select Uphold. 

Let’s look at getting an Uphold account in detail. 

You can sign up for Uphold at www.uphold.com. Click Sign Up to get started. 

You’ll be taken to the sign up page, where you select to sign up as an Individual or as a Business. 

To sign up as an individual, you’ll need to supply an email address, account password, your country of residence, state of residence (if in the U.S.) and citizenship. 

You’ll add your full legal name, legal address, date of birth, and SSN/TIN. You will verify your email address and submit a W9. You will verify your identity with Veriff, an app that allows you to upload photos of your government identification and a photo of yourself.  

If this seems like a lot of personal information, remember that Uphold is a regulated financial platform. It needs certain information to be able to verify who its customers are as part of Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations that prevent money laundering and other financial crimes. 

Once your account is verified, you can visit your dashboard. Uphold is a platform for trading as well as a digital wallet, so on your dashboard you will see a lot of options for trading cryptocurrency. We’re using Uphold only as a digital wallet, so you can ignore the Trading card on the far left of the dashboard. 

To sign up for a Business account at Uphold wallet requires more documentation. 

You will need to fill out an application and will be asked to include the following documents:

• Legal Entity Name/DBA

• Legal Entity Type. Is your business a sole proprietorship, partnership, nonprofit, S corp?

• Legal Entity Registration Number. TIN or EIN for your organization. Please note that if you use a fiscal sponsor, your sponsor may not approve use of their EIN for this purpose. 

• Registered Address/Mailing Address. PO Boxes are not accepted.

• Website. If applicable. 

• Source of Funds/Source of Wealth. Where did the funds for this organization originate? 

• Business Activity

• Account Holder Information/Authorized Signer Information/Trustee Information

In addition, you may be asked to submit further documentation including articles of incorporation, articles of organization, and bylaws. Registered nonprofits may be required to submit their latest 990 and a beneficial ownership form listing all board members. 

A full list of the documents required can be found here. 

Applying for a business account takes some time. Make sure you have your documents ready and expect to spend about fifteen to twenty minutes on the application. You will hear from Uphold within a matter of days. 

With your Uphold wallet established, you can link your bank account. Linking a bank account will allow you to withdraw your funds. Click the green My Banks button on the Transact card.

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.

This payment pointer is your unique identifier for streaming payments using Web Monetization. A payment pointer is like an email address for your digital wallet. You will be able to add it to your Coil account and other third party Web Monetized platforms. You can also hard code it into your website. It will start with “$ilp.uphold.com/” and end in a unique alphanumeric sequence. 

To find your payment pointer on your Uphold dashboard:

Look at the rightmost card on the dashboard. This is the Transact card.

Select the dropdown menu under From. You’ll see Interledger Network listed at the bottom.

Select Interledger. You’ll get a card with the message: “Use the following address to receive Interledger payments in your wallet.” Your payment pointer will appear at the bottom of the card.

Copy the payment pointer. You’re ready to add that pointer to your Coil Creator profile. Linking Coil and your Uphold wallet via your payment pointer allows you to start monetizing content.

At Coil, click Creator in the top navigation. Then click “Start Monetizing. It’s Free.” You’ll be asked to set up your wallet. Select Uphold.

If you’re logged in to your Coil account, you will be taken to your Coil Creators Monetization page. Here you will be able to add your payment pointer to your Payout Wallet settings.

From this page you can easily connect your YouTube channel and enable Web Monetization. Payments will stream to you every second a Web Monetized user watches your channel. Coil provides you with a tag to use to add Web Monetization to your website. We’ll go over these implementations in the next lesson. 

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.

Here are some easy ways to enable Web Monetization on your own content. 

1. YouTube

Coil offers an easy, one-step process for monetizing your YouTube channel. 

Go to your Coil Creators Monetization page. This is where you added your payment pointer and connected your Uphold wallet. 

At the bottom of the page you will see Monetize YouTube Channel. 

Simply press Add Channel and follow the OAuth flow to connect Coil to your YouTube channel. Allow Coil access, and voila, your YouTube channel is now Web Monetized. This means that when users with Coil membership watch your video, they will stream payments to your account.

2. Free Music Archive.

The Free Music Archive (FMA) makes available open license music from independent artists around the world. If you have music you want to share under such a license, FMA is a good way to get started with Coil and Web Monetization. 

Your first step is to sign up for an account. You’ll be asked for a password and to verify your email address. You will now be an FMA Member. 

To become an FMA Musician, you need to create an account and then email the administration, meghan@tribeofnoise.com with the subject line “FMA artist account.” Your account will be changed from Member to Artist. 

If you have an existing page on FMA – you should check; search for your name on the site – you can claim it. As FMA writes on their support page:  

Go to your FMA artist page

• Under the Bio section, click on the “Claim This Page” button

• Add the information required, check the boxes and agree

• To Finalize, scroll below and click on the “Claim your page” button

If you have an artist account on FMA and become a Coil creator, you can easily add your Coil payment pointer to your FMA profile. Go to your Artist page. Go to the Edit button and select the  Monetization section. Here you will be able to add your payment pointer. 

3. Monetized. 

Monetized is a new tool for gating digital content. Content can be added by file uploads, content embeds, and link redirects. Monetized works on the URL level. Each piece of gated content receives its own monetized link and a payment-gated landing page. 

To get started, sign up for an account. Link your content. You can link URLs or Notion pages. You can also upload files and embed video and audio in a new post. 

After you link your content, set your price and payment method. Select Web Monetization. Press the button to Configure to add your payment pointer.

Publish your page. Share your link. Anyone who follows the link will come to a payment-gated landing page. Now only your Web Monetized fans can access your page. A button will prompt users to sign up for Web Monetization at Coil. 

4. Add Coil to your WordPress site

If you use WordPress, there is an easy way to get your site Web Monetized and offer premium content to Web Monetized users. Coil makes a plugin for WordPress. The plugin applies the Web Monetization meta tag to each page of your website. It lets you customize the visibility of posts. This means that you can offer premium content to your Web Monetized users. 

From your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Plugins and click on Add New. Search for Coil. Install Coil Web Monetization plugin. 

Click Activate. Once it’s installed, the plugin will appear as an option on your WordPress admin dashboard. 

You’ll need to add your payment pointer. Select the Coil plugin and go to the Global Settings tab. Add your payment pointer and click on Save Settings. Your WordPress site is now Web Monetized. 

The default settings for your content will Web Monetize your posts and pages AND keep them public. You can change these settings from the Content Settings tab in the Coil plugin. 

For more on customizing your WordPress plugin, check out this video tutorial from Artist Rescue Trust:

If your site is not a WordPress site, you can still add Web Monetization by adding a single HTML tag into the header of your website. This involves editing the HTML of your site. 

If you’re interested in a technical overview of the process of adding Web Monetization to a web page, Web Monetization.org has an overview to get you started. 

To make the process as easy for you as possible, Coil provides you with a meta tag that can be added to your website. You can find this tag on your Coil Creators page where it has been customized for your payment pointer.

For information on adding Web Monetization to your own website using HTML, please watch this video tutorial from Artist Rescue Trust:

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.

We’ve covered how Web Monetization works. You’re now familiar with the components – Coil + digital wallet + payment pointer. We’ve outlined a few ways to get started with Web Monetization as a creator. 

To get a full picture of the vision for Web Monetization, specifically how it can help creators, let’s compare Web Monetization with Coil to an important streaming service for music, Spotify. 

Many of you have music on Spotify. How many of you have ever received a check from the service? 

Spotify’s payout accounting is complicated. A 2020 Business Insider report found that musicians earn as little as $0.0033 per stream on Spotify. However, Spotify does not pay per stream. Instead, it calculates earnings based on “streamshare,” a metric that accounts for both an artist's streams and the total number of streams per that artist’s market. 

[Keep in mind: Spotify pays rights holders, which may or may not be the same as the artist.]

In 2022 Clare Mulroy at USA Today analyzed the creator revenue share system at Spotify. They contacted the streaming behemoth for more information on ‘streamshare.’ "Every month, in each country we operate in, we calculate streamshare by adding up how many times music owned or controlled by a particular rights holder was streamed and dividing it by the total number of streams in that market," Spotify explained. (Apple Music also pays on a stream share basis.)

From the article:

The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers found artists were paid an average of just over half a cent per stream in 2018 and under a third of a cent in 2020. The average artist pay rate declined 43% over two years.

Music lovers are taking notice. In August 2022 Congresswoman Rashiada Tlaib introduced House Concurrent Resolution 102. The bill “recognizes the need to establish a new royalty program that would directly compensate musicians with a fairer royalty payment every time their music is listened to on a streaming music service, like Spotify.”

From the press release: 

Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, paid rights holders an average per-stream royalty of $0.0030 – at that rate, it would take more than 800,000 monthly streams to equal the wage of a full-time worker earning $15/hour. According to the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization, even the current meager streaming rates are declining every year.

You can read House Concurrent Resolution 102 here. 

Let’s compare Spotify’s payout policy with Coil’s implementation of Web Monetization.

Coil sends micropayments per second per user. Payments are streamed according to how long the user is consuming – in this case paying attention – to the content. On the supporter side, Coil charges a flat fee of $5 per month. Those fees fund the payouts to content creators. 

From Coil’s website: 

Coil “streams payments” instantly instead of keeping a running ledger of what each creator and website is due. They pay websites and creators continuously while the subscriber visits their content at a rate of 0.0001 USD/second. Websites can use the proposed Web Monetization API web-standard to check and verify when and how much clients are actively paying them. This can be used to unlock subscriber-only content (like a universal pay-wall), hide ads, or otherwise customize the customer experience.

This payout policy removes the streamshare variable. Your content earns you per second, per user. 

Of course, the more Web Monetized users you have visiting your content, the more money you will receive. To date, Web Monetization has not attracted nearly as many users as Spotify has. 

Let’s do the math.

Let’s imagine a song streams on Spotify. The song’s duration is 3 minutes, or 180 seconds. Let’s assume 800,000 monthly streams, the figure that Congresswoman Tlaib uses. 

With Spotify: 800,000 monthly streams * 0.0033 per stream = $2,640

With Coil: 800,000 streamers * 180 = 144,000,000 seconds * 0.0001 = $14,400

Looking at these stream numbers another way for our 3-minute song:

Spotify revenue per stream: $0.0033

Coil revenue per stream: $0.018

A Note about YouTube

In order to unlock YouTube’s monetization features, your channel needs to have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours. YouTube’s monetization relies on advertising. Many YouTube channels rely on brand partnerships to make their channels profitable. 

Coil will allow you to monetize your videos. Any Web Monetization member who visits your channel will stream you payments. Additionally, any of your videos embedded in Web Monetized sites or platforms will also earn you money. No need to get your subscriber list to 1,000.  

The key to earning with Web Monetization is two-part:

1. Have your content on Web Monetized sites and/or platforms. 

2. Have Web Monetization members coming to your content. 

Placing Your Content on Web Monetized Platforms

If you Web Monetize your personal site, consider creating a page for archived digital content. Place your reels and videos here, including anything you’ve shared on social media. Blogs, performance calendars, videos all become Web Monetized content. 

Add Web Monetization via Coil to your YouTube channel. Try the Free Music Archive. Gate content for Web Monetization members at Monetized. 

The more time Web Monetized visitors spend on your site and your content, the more funds will stream to you. 

This leads us to the question . . . .

How Do I Get More Web Monetization Members Coming to My Site? 

1. Convert your audience. 

If you’ve added Web Monetization to your site, consider placing the following language on your Support Us page:

[Artist or Org] has built this site with Web Monetization, a new protocol for streaming payments. Web Monetization sends micropayments for every second a Web Monetization member enjoys our content. [Artist] spends hundreds of hours creating content to share via this site. Please consider becoming a Web Monetization member to support this work. It will take less than ten minutes to set up your account and will cost you only $5 a month. For information on becoming a Web Monetization member, click here.

Coil offers an affiliate referral program. You will earn additional funds from any supporter who joins Coil from your referral link.

2. Inform your supporters. 

We’ve supplied you with shareable information about the economics of streaming platforms like Spotify. Recent research has shown that most people underestimate the revenue that artists make from streaming services. You can copy and paste that information into a shareable email to send to your supporters and encourage them to join Web Monetization. 

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have been studying the effect of the visibility of Web Monetization on user preferences. The team found that “when users are aware that their online browsing provides monetary compensation to content creators, they prefer to consume content from non-profit organizations or independent creators and activists over that of mainstream media outlets.”

Web Monetization for the Arts is a course on streaming payments designed for classical musicians and small performing arts groups. The project is funded by Grant for the Web.