Project Funding
What is crowd-gifting?
Crowd-gifting typically entails a group of individuals pooling small amounts of money together in order to give a gift that is beyond one person’s reach.
Crowd-gifting is perhaps best explained like this: "Hey, can you sign the You’re the Greatest card and put a few bucks into the envelope?
In Looking for Arete, crowd-gifting is what shifts my artwork gift from being a token of personal gratitude into a communal gift. When they are crowd-gifted, Looking for Arete gifts have two distinct parts: the artwork itself and financial funds.
The artwork is a memento of the immense effort, perseverance and fortitude which has made a unique arete (excellence) happen. The monetary portion of the gift is an emblem of a community’s desire for that arete (striving for highest potential) to continue.
To put it another way...the signatures on the group card express collective 'You're freakin' AMAZING!' and the huge wad of cash in the envelope says 'Go get 'em, Tiger!'
Why crowdgifting is being used in the project
Conceptually, giving an artwork away is easy, because I love giving gifts. However, the physical reality of doing it...not so much. Because no matter how much I would like to deny this fact, there is a bottom line to making my artwork. It requires extensive amounts of time, physical and mental energy, equipment and supplies. And all these resources have actual costs.
Hmm...the same could be said for pursuing any arete.
Crowd-gifting in Looking for Arete, therefore, is dually benevolent. It benefits not only the recipient but me as well.
No matter what an arete is—physical, spiritual, creative, or intellectual—there are real costs related to pursuing it. And many people of arete (myself included) Pay to Play: they finance their quest for arete largely by themselves, often at great cost.