Kickstarter backer art party
This speaks volumes, I think, about Amanda Palmer’s relationship with her fans. Yes, you can say that these images show us that she’s an exhibitionist, a narcissist, that she loves an excuse to get naked in public–all of those things are presumably true to some extent, and I see no problem with any of those things in the way she engages with the media – but the thing I think is important here is trust. She trusts her fans, not only with her music, not only with intimate information about her life via her blog, but with her body in all its vulnerability.
That is huge, especially in an era of bodyguards and guardrails and a Berlin Wall of personal assistants, and a general cultural attitude that treats celebrities as beings that are somehow physically manifest differently from all the rest of us, with our weird corporeal bodies. This kind of relationship to audience is more Marina Abramovic than American Idol, and I think that is what rock n roll is all about.