Getting Away With It

Amanda Palmer, the singer who raised a spectacular sum on Kickstarter to fund her new album and then neglected to pay the musicians who toured with her, is the Internet’s villain of the month. Her hypocrisy becomes particularly egregious when you consider her supposed artistic lineage. She started out as half of Dresden Dolls, a band that achieved cult popularity in the aughts, and which she described as “Brechtian punk cabaret.” Bertolt Brecht and punk rock suggest some affinity for social justice—or even anti-capitalist militancy. Now she is a folk singer, a genre that often takes up the cause of social justice. This throws her peculiarly unjust plan into still sharper relief. Beneath that, however, is an interesting set of problems about art and work in an age when the mechanisms for valuing them have broken down.