I Wish I Was Amanda Palmer (Or: On The Struggle Between Being an Artist and a Marketer)

Like all good punk girls, I want to be Amanda Palmer.

Musician, artist, author, TED presenter, married to Neil Gaiman (technically, I think that makes Gulliver the ex-goth more jealous than it makes me – because: Sandman.).

She’s the writer I wish I was. The fearless artist I wish I was. She’s got the voice I wish I had**.

(**It’s the bane of my existence that my voice is best suited to country and folk music. The very conservatism of that fact feels like a betrayal of my soul on part of my body.)

She’s a feminist with a voice – when the Daily Mail made the mistake of trying to humiliate her by posting a photo of her breast slippage at Glastonbury, she responded in song:

dear daily mail,


it’s so sad what you tabloids are doing


your focus on debasing women’s appearances ruins our species of humans


but a rag is a rag and far be it from me to go censoring anyone OH NO


it appears that my entire body is currently trying to escape this kimono….

dear daily mail,


you misogynist pile of twats


i’m tired of these baby bumps, vadge flashes, muffintops
 where are the newsworthy COCKS?


if iggy or jagger or bowie go topless the news barely causes a ripple


blah blah blah feminist blah blah blah gender shit blah blah blah


OH MY GOD NIPPLE

And like most of my artistic and creative heroes, I fear she’d despise me.

Because I am the bane of the artists existence – I’m the businesswoman. The marketer. The scourge of society. A member of the secret society responsible for the downfall of … everything.

It’s something I’ve struggled with over the last decade of my career, that inherent disconnect between what I do and who I wanted to be.

I fell into marketing. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I said yes to the opportunities that came up for me – and they were all corporate, business. I got deeper and deeper in, without really noticing. Abandoning my art and unable to understand why the business victories felt hollow.

For a while, I tried to bring the artist into the marketing. Those experiments were probably our least successful, financially. The more creative, different and interesting the marketing pieces, the less the response.

That’s my own fault – I threw out the first rule of marketing: focus on the niche. And let’s face it, the biz opp / small business / IM market are not interested in creativity. They want “hacks”. They’re interested in having an “emotions matrix” so that they can understand, mathematically, how people will respond to their marketing. **

(** I wish that was me being funny. But that’s a real thing.)

Assuming I can’t pull off some kind of “Freaky Friday” magic, I’ll never be Amanda Palmer. Besides, I just don’t think I could pull off those eyebrows.

But I can make more room for art.

As a writer married to a musician, it really doesn’t have to be as difficult as I’ve made it. It never has been. I never needed to give it up … I should have been more conscious about the decision.

The basic urge to create. To build. To make things. The creative desire I’ve poured into building a business – turning my back on so many of the things that mean so much to me.

What integral part of you are you subconsciously repressing?

Creativity needs pause – needs procrastination. If you’re taking a break, that’s cool – but do it consciously.

There’s a balancing act required between the creative and the material. The material is important – making art, and having the space to make art, requires money, just like everything else. I don’t believe in the creative to the exclusion of the material.

But going too far the other way – the material to the exclusion of the creative – doesn’t work either. If you’re creative – and I believe that most of us are; that creativity is the most pure form of spirituality (more on that in a coming article) – it’ll leave you with a general sense of longing that you can’t shake, and that you probably struggle to define.

P.S. Amanda is in Australia right now promoting her new book, “The Art of Asking” – if you can get to one of her gigs, you’d be crazy not to.

I’m pretty sure Melbourne is sold out, but they just moved the Sydney gig to the Enmore. Tickets here:

http://premier.ticketek.com.au/shows/show.aspx?sh=AMANDAPA15