20 Reasons I'm Not Donating To Your Kickstarter

If you must produce a proudct that is geared toward capitalizing on the trends of the day, go ahead and sell it on some boardwalk on some beach somewhere. Don't fundraise for it. Spare me the Honey Badger condiments, the Bed Intruder pillow cases, and the Condescending Wonka diaphragms. Kickstarter is for innnovative ideas, not crass capitalization on memes and viral videos. I already feel dumb enough for laughing at Grumpy Cat every time I see it. How dumb would I feel if I bought a crocheted Grumpy Cat throw rug? Actually, that sounds good, I'll take four.

There are so many cool gadgets on Kickstarter, so of course I am not going to be putting any money towards the dumb one that you invented. There is always room in the world for another work of art, even it it makes a similiar statement to work that has come before. There is no room in my closet for any more quirky iPad cases or weird watches, so I'm going to pass on your invention. Also, I don't own an iPad, and who wears watches anymore?

What I'm really against is products inspired by politics I disagree with, like shirts that are thinly veiled Tea Party propoganda. That being said, I am not likely to donate to your political project, even if it's right up my legislative ally. If I was tempted to do that, I would probably just donate to an actual political party. They all sell t-shirts and mugs and such with the added bonus of maybe getting a candidate elected. No matter how much I love to invest in your funny shirts with liberal puns about the Supreme Court justices, I would prefer if my money went to fund the ineffective farce that is our government rather than the ineffective farce that is your novelty t-shirt business.

Solo shows are much maligned, so making fun of them feels like kicking them when they're down. For the record, the best maligning I've seen of them is probably this SNL sketch. If you are going to set up a Kickstarter for your solo show, you had better lay out very clearly why the world needs to provide funds to make it possible to put you on a bare stage. The one-person show is already one of the most indulgent art forms in human history, but if you are going to ask your friends for cash to put it up and then beg them to see it, there better be some Spalding Gray level monologuing.

I know projects like this are meant as jokes, but people actually donated money to this one. What if one of these gag projects funded and whoever was behind it was tasked with actually creating a Death Star. I'm not saying it is likely with a goal like that, but I like to believe that nothing is impossible. I won't be donating to this or any other clearly fictional Kickstarters, no matter how funny they are.

So, you need me to give you money so you have more time to write? Oh, you want me to pay for the vanity press of your book that publishers don't want? You could just self publish an e-book for free, but there needs to a hard copy of the book so you can ask me to buy it once you've printed them? Sign me up. There are many art forms that have been democratized by Kickstarter. The massive financial comittments associated with film, theatre, and art installation have long been begging for something like Kickstarter to come along. Writing, however, was doing just fine for many many years before Kickstarter, and we suspect it will continue to thrive as a form once crowd-funding has fallen out of favor. Granted, I'm not in the publishing industry (hey, who is anymore, am I right?), but it's hard to wrap my head around how my money could possibly go to use in the creation of your book in a way that makes me anything but angry.

One Kickstarter per calendar year: that's all I can allow. If your next Kickstarter is in a different art form than the one you were trumpeting a few months ago, then you'd best wait forever before you ask me to donate to it. To my mind, not only am I Kickstarting your project, I'm Kickstarting your career. If you finish your product, it crashes and burns in the marketplace, and you come around begging again, what do you expect me to do? There are artists out there who can successfully pull off more than one crowdfunding campaign. These people have fan bases that love the off-kilter, outside the box work of that artist and want to support it because it ignores commercial concerns. If you're a serial crowdfunder begging me for money on Facebook or via emaill, odds are I am not the dedicated fan you're looking for. Be very careful before you ask the world to donate to your crowdfunding effort. You probably only have one shot to get it right.

Your product may be wonderful. You may make the best cheeses, honeys, socks, or whatever, just please don't call it "artisanal." I know it's artisanal. You make it. You're not a factory. You're a person. You're an artisan. The adjective exists for items in Whole Foods to assure me that they belong there and aren't just greenwashing us for a quick buck. If you're asking for cash to make something on Kickstarter, it kind of has to be artisianl. Though I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to start running Kickstarters to save a buck, I'm going to assume that any project that is tossed up on a crowd-funding platform isn't being made by a multi-national corporation.

Okay, I don't know how much an International Space Station is supposed to cost, but I do know that a music video shot on your iPhone shouldn't cost $50,000. Odds are if you are looking to produce a project that costs more than my college education, I am going to be pretty suspicious of where my money's going. I am well aware that $50,000 is chump change for a film, and I know that art generally costs more to make than you'd think, but that is why big time art has investors and not donors. When I think about artistic Kickstarters, I think of them as proof of concept. I'm going to help you do this thing on a small scale so that it has a chance of getting into film festivals, catching the eye of a big time music producer, or earning you an artistic benefactor. Once you get into the big leagues, you'll be expected to turn a profit, and you'll be a bona fide artist. If you try to run before you can crawl, you'll look like a naive amatuer, and I'll save my cash for someone with their head a little below the clouds.

Hey, I like Americana music. I enjoy it when the Avett Brothers do it. I enjoy when Old Crow Medicine Show does it. I tolerate it when Mumford & Sons do it. It's just that banjo-driven bands are to music as super heroes and zombies combined are to the cinema. If I see a banjo, it better not be accompanied by suspenders and vocal harmonies. And if you throw in a mandolin, well, you'd best being playing bluegrass. We're glad that you're part of the roots music movement, but aren't you supposed to play in box cars and on street corners, and beg for money there instead of on the Internet? Take your 1920s hobo chic elsewhere buster. And don't come back until you're a featured artist on NPR's website!

Unlike Pat Smith, I didn't do anything to help make your project, except give you money. In the arts in general, and film in particular, producer credits are doled out like candy on Halloween in the suburbs. This has been true at least since the 60s. In the pilot of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou (Ed Asner) tells Mary (Mary Tyler Moore) that she can be producer instead of a secretary, but she'll have to take a pay cut. Little has changed since then. Sure, trained career producers bring creative projects to life, but spending $50 on your short film doesn't automatically make me David L. Wolper. Spare me the titles and just give me a dope t-shirt if you want me to help you bring your artistic vision to life.

If there's one group of fictional creatures that have had more exposure than super heroes, it's zombies. When will we be ready to let sleeping zombies stay undead? I have no idea. But for me, it can't happen soon enough. It's almost poetic how the zombie genre has become like its subject, stale, empty, and cadaverous. There is obviously still room for great zombie art. The Walking Dead graphic novel and the World War Z novel are both less than a decade old. The bar is just incredibly high, and you're going to have to get through a horde of zombie art to clear it. Even if you offer a host of absolutely ghoulish perks, I'm going to board up my digital windows and let none of my money or provisions escape.

Much love and respect to the graphic novel as an art form, and far be it from me to hate on the comics world, which I know very little about. All I'm saying is that now might not be the time to strike with a super hero parody. There are probably people out there who haven't gotten enough super hero parody action from The Incredibles, Kick-Ass, and Mystery Men, and then went to seek out graphic novels that gave them more. Those people have likely been satisfied by this point, unless they have a genuine addiction. The same is true of the dystopian-super-hero-world-Watchmen-rip-off genre that is on the other side of the same coin. There may be a community of people out there who aren't going through super hero genre commentary fatigue right now, but I don't know them. I bet that this group of people is not large enough to fund a printing of your graphic novel. If I'm wrong, I'll donate to your Kickstarter.

I've already been over the major genres and common projects, but I'll just come out and say it: if it's already out there, do something else. Yes, there is nothing new under the sun, but don't do something just like the project I saw yesterday. We've all had the experience where we think we have a great idea, and then we see someone else release something incredibly similar before we can put thought into action. When that happens, it's time to breathe, put that project away and wait until the buzz on your clone has died down. It isn't an easy thing to do, but you also don't want to launch your awesome project just to have it overshadowed by the Gerard Butler vehicle currently playing in theatres that's just like it. Live to fight another, better day, when that hot romcom is just an old Gerard Butler project that nobody remembers and people didn't really like that much anyway.

The Internet had a field day mocking Zosia Mamet's Kickstarter a month and a half ago, and I'm not here to pile on. Zosia, without you, I would hate every single girl on Girls: I've got no hate for you. It's just hard for me to look at someone who is already connected and say, "you know what, they need my help." The nepotism argument surrounding the cast of Girls and anyone else who was spawned from a star these days is a little bit ridiculous. We don't flip our shit when the son of a plumber becomes a plumber and that happens all the time. I just can't see my way clear to opening up my checkbook for someone who already has a leg up on the rest of us. It's hard for me to buy that some of that cash from Girls couldn't have covered a music video, but I refuse to believe that Big Daddy Dave couldn't have peeled off some Glenngary Glen Ross royalties for his girls. This is one of very few instances where the Internet seems to agree with me, since not only did the project fail, but the poor Cabin Sisters got dragged across the hot digital coals of the blogosphere.

Judging by the amount of money this infamous project raised, there are a number of folks out there who disagree with me, but I stand by the principle that if you're a celebrity, I'm not donating to your Kickstarter. I'm not here to get into an ethical argument about the relationship between fans and celebrities in the Internet age. Every blog on the Internet has already done that for you, so we won't rehash it here. It's just simple math from my perspective. Celebrities (that haven't been involved in real estate deals gone bad or ponzi schemes) have more money than me already, so I'm not going to give money to a celebrity. If you're the variety of famous person that has such a strong cult following that you can fund pretty much whatever you want (shout out to Amanda Palmer), then more power to you, but I won't be among the legions tossing in cash to keep you in the fame game. Zach Braff can do whatever he wants, but I can do without him crowd funding just so he can have final cut. Word to Spike Lee.