For years there’s been a campaign within the Flow Arts community (and let’s face it throughout the artistic world) to stop accepting exposure as a form of compensation. It places negative pressure on the value of performance and the wider community and I think it’s a good and necessary step to helping more businesses grow and allow people to do what they love for a living.

But I think it also doesn’t go far enough.

You see, there’s another way that artists are undercompensated for their skills and time that frequently flies under the radar and is so saturated within our culture that at times it seems transparent.

We need to stop accepting payment in validation.

Stop me if you’ve heard this story: a fledgling flow artist has been in the scene a few months or years and they see all these amazing people around them that they look up to and wish they could be more like. Suddenly someone offers them something--a spot performing onstage at a festival, a role organizing a flow event, a gig teaching how to spin their tool. No matter what the offer is, this neophyte suddenly feels something really good: they feel seen. They feel important. They feel as though they’re no longer a background player but now someone who has a role.

A little down the line there may be other people who come up to them and tell them how much they appreciated their performance, thank them for organizing the event, express gratitude for what they’ve just been taught. And the feeling grows...they feel more important and like they’re starting to become one of those people they used to look up to.

They feel validated.

So let me just say real quickly that there is NOTHING wrong with validation. To a certain extent it helps us all as a form of motivation or benchmark for the impact we’re having in our community.

The problem comes when that is the primary way that we are compensated for doing any of these roles. And even moreso when it becomes the currency by which our community operates. Let me outline some examples.

Performance

The conversation about working for exposure (which, for the record I also don’t think you ought to do in most cases) has an interesting shadow side: the conversation about undercutting.

I know that to speak of this meme is to inevitably create a rancorous and long series of increasingly intense comments and message threads but bear with me because it has something to do with my central thesis.

Undercutting is the practice of charging less than market rate for a performance. It’s a rampant problem in many markets and it also has one of its roots in our friend validation.

One of the most common questions people ask as they get into the performance world is how much to charge, what is their work worth, what do other people charge? Sharing this kind of information can rapidly become an exercise in the darker side of Game Theory as neophytes suddenly seeing what others are charging realize both that it’s a higher number than they’d had in their heads as well as many see an opportunity to be able to gain a foothold into the local performance market by knowing they’re offering their services at a lower price than many other professionals in the area.

But why would they even do a thing like this? If they know they could make more money then why deliberately put themselves in a position where they’re primed to make less?

There’s a process that many people go through in negotiating gigs that is so common I’m sure many of my readers will recognize it instantly. Let’s walk through the process:

You have a number in mind. Maybe it’s a number you’ve gotten from someone else in your area or maybe it’s a number you’ve come up with yourself but there’s something that’s causing you anxiety when you think about it: it seems really high.

Is a potential client actually going to be willing to pay that amount? What if they just laugh you off and hang up the phone or ghost you on email? The mere thought of it seems absolutely crushing.

But wait...there’s clearly a variable in this transaction that we aren’t accounting for. After all, it would be just as easy to laugh the client off if they low-ball you or ghost them instead. So why is the fear that they will do this to you?

Because the other price that’s being negotiated here is validation. It’s having someone think you’re good enough to get on a stage. That compensation can be worth quite a bit of money to a lot of people...so they’ll accept a lower rate to avoid the crushing fear of rejection rather than being willing to reject the client. There is a piece of this transaction wherein they are perceiving their own worth through the eyes of that client.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t people that resort to undercutting as a means of deliberately stealing business from others. This is a very real thing and it’s a huge risk that many performers take in sharing their rates. But at the same time there are a seemingly endless pool of new performers coming into the performance world who at least partially are looking to engage in it not as a business but as a form of validation. And frequently that validation is worth quite a lot of money to them and they either knowingly or unknowingly create negative cost pressure on the rate of performance as a result.

But the consequences of performing for validation don’t end there.

When validation is the primary means of compensation for a performer, it means that the audience or client is there to serve them rather than the other way around.

At many flow arts showcase events such as spin jams and gala shows, for example, this results in a kind of social contract wherein supporting someone onstage in turn results in you yourself being supported should you choose to go onstage.

Bear in mind that these situations create a feedback loop of praise whether the artist performing is actually any good or not. They are congratulated for having been brave enough to get onstage in the first place.

So what’s wrong with people getting to live out a fantasy of being onstage and be appreciated for it? Nothing at all...but that’s not a performance. It’s a support group.

When this is done in public settings for non-flow audiences it creates a couple problems. The first is that performances done for the sake of the artist feeling good about themselves have no incentive to create performances that are actually entertaining for their audience. When the audience is there to serve you, you don’t have to put much work into pacing, composition, or presentation. A non-flow audience member will walk away having seen an amateurish performance and conclude that if the people in the local flow community put such a performance onstage then the community itself must likewise be fairly amateurish.

The other side of this is what happens as soon as someone who has bought into the social contract of performance validation encounters people who have not: disaster is right around the corner.

They may post video of themselves performing online or have an in-person performance where someone calls out their amateurish work for being sloppy or having little effort invested into it*. The performer who has bought into the validation social contract has a moment of crisis--they were not prepared to be criticized and at best they are hurt and at worst they rage quit the group or community amid calls of a “toxic” attitude there. Those that have bought into this ecosystem are ill-prepared to receive any kind of negative feedback to their work and retreat to nurse their bruised ego.

What’s the solution to this? As painful as it might be, you have to say no to some people.

Create opportunities for people that simply want the validation to be able to perform for their peers and get to live out their fantasy. They’re not wrong for wanting to do so, but create a separate ecosystem for them to get that experience from. Flow Arts open mic/stage? Sounds like a good sandbox for people to get comfortable being in front of others.

If the audience is the general public, say no to people that aren’t ready for prime-time. Say yes to the people that have decided that they know their true value. Be ready for hurt feelings but know that ultimately you’re doing a service both to the other performers as well as your community. You’ll be called elitist. Life will go on.

Fire Festivals

Validation as payment is so deeply embedded in fire festival culture that I think it would be difficult to dislodge, but I will try to examine here many of the reasons why it’s so pernicious as well as the damage it causes.

Put simply: the vast majority of the labor that goes into creating festivals is volunteer labor. There may be a few individuals at the top of the organizational chart that receive real compensation for their work but nearly all the people you encounter at a festival whether they be teaching, performing, or running the event itself are unpaid and again running on validation.

I’ve written before about how compensation for teachers at festivals remains low due to negative pressure put on the labor market due to abundance. At most festivals there will be a handful (usually around a dozen) instructors that are receiving payment to be there (though also many are simply receiving a travel stipend and their profits from the event may be quite low) and the rest are all unpaid volunteers.

Some people want to do this to support and participate in their community--and good on them!

But when there are 3-4 people vying for each workshop slot and only 1 asking for a travel stipend it makes it pretty easy to go with one of the free options rather than the paid one.

You’ll note: few if any events actually track the satisfaction people have with the workshops they’ve taken. There is no system in place to take feedback on individual instructors and their level of professionalism or even whether they or anybody else showed up for their classes at all.

Why?

Because the purpose here isn’t to create an ideal learning environment--it’s to check off a box in attendees’ expectations and do so paying out as little as possible.

Like the performance example, here the organizers of the festival and whatever attendees may show up to a workshop are there to validate the teacher rather than the teacher being there to instruct the students. If the latter were the case, there would be some effort to track the efficacy of each instructor and as it stands there is none. Instead, the vast majority of the people who get to teach are there to feel as though they’ve been seen.

The ramifications of this are even more problematic when we look at it on an organizational level.

Just like with performance and teaching, it’s easy to undervalue a role when there are several people waiting in line to take it just for the opportunity to feel seen. But whereas the threshold for negative consequences is comparatively low for people seeking to be seen as performers or teachers the consequences here have much bigger implications.

Running events is incredibly hard work and requires an enormous investment of labor and capital. First year events NEVER make a profit because there is so much money sunk into creating infrastructure and the need to build an audience (which takes time).

In theory, that infrastructure is reused year after year and the lessons learned from one year translate into saving costs the next year--but not when institutional knowledge isn’t preserved.

If you’re running a festival on a volunteer basis, you are racing against the clock. You’ll pour yourself with enthusiasm into the task and knowing that you’re creating something that is going to be helpful to your community and allow lots of people to have a great time. And at the end you’ll be exhausted. The good feels will gradually fade and when the event comes back around you’ll be left to think about undertaking all that labor again.

Are you going to do all that work while you spend hundreds of dollars to drive to the event, camp out, and purchase food for the weekend? Are you going to pay to work an event?

For a lot of people the answer for years at a time is yes. In my experience lots of people will do it for a year, some people will do it for 2-3, and almost nobody will do it longer than 4. The numbers just don’t add up after a while.

When you have a staff that turns over every 2 years and none of them are documenting the job they’re doing, it effectively means that the event is running like a first year event almost every year. There are loads of unnecessary sunk costs and lost labor due to new people having to learn their roles every year.

I’ve seen many people online cite one of the biggest reasons that they’ve ceased attending festivals is that the cost of the events goes up while the quality of the offerings does not.

This is why this happens.

Costs continue to rise due to having to reinvent the wheel every 2 years and the running of the event never improves because roles are not documented and organizers turn over rapidly.

As a festival organizer myself, I lost one of my most competent employees when he asked for enough money to cover his gas and a pet sitter during the event. Bear in mind he wasn’t trying to profit off of it, he was just hoping to not go into the hole investing hundreds of hours in working there.

He held his ground despite the festival manager telling him that his work wasn’t valuable enough to justify the expenditure and as much as it broke my heart to lose him I was proud of him for knowing his value and fighting for it.

A couple caveats:

First, there are absolutely festivals that are outliers that do document each of their roles so that they’re easy for new volunteer organizers to acclimate to as the staff turns over. I can think of one or two...they can still have problems due to turnover. Documenting roles is only one part of this equation and definitely helps bring new people up to speed, but when your turnover is rapid you’re also in a position where the staff isn’t watching trends from year to year and adapting to the changing tastes of the attendees or working hard to bring in new ones.

Second, I’m sure that many larger festivals like Burning Man and EDC also face lots of turnover from year to year, so how come they’re not experiencing many of these same problems? The short answer is that I don’t know but here’s my guess: they’re paying their administrative staff enough to keep them a part of the organization from year to year so that they can hold onto institutional knowledge and adapt as the times change.

So: not only does paying organizers in validation make the events more expensive to run overall, it also is a factor in declining attendance.

Paying people to learn their jobs and learn how to do them better is a cornerstone for any business to grow and thrive and without this very basic investment in human capital we will continue to see festivals decline in both quality and attendance.

Teaching

A final avenue in which people frequently accept validation as payment comes in the form of teaching. We’ve already discussed the impact this has on fire festivals but I’d like to take a moment to discuss how it works outside the festival world, too.

A lot of this overlaps with the situation in the performance world in that there’s a certain ecosystem that gets set up where people kind of mutually agree to validate each other, regardless of their skill as a teacher or even with their tool of choice.

And I will say that teaching is a skill that must be learned and there inevitably will be a point in that journey when you are teaching people for free in order to gain experience that will translate into being a better teacher.

But there is one very important thing you need to do: collect feedback, HONEST feedback from your students. You need to make finding out what didn’t work as if not more important than finding out what did work. If the idea of receiving this kind of feedback makes you uncomfortable then you are not ready to take your work as a teacher seriously and again...are looking for compensation in the form of validation.

Teachers that seek validation over nurturing their students create an enormous problem for the community as a whole because they are frequently gatekeepers into it.

A bad teacher can make a student feel as though their inability to grasp a trick or concept is their own fault and make them doubt their ability to learn the tool. This robs the community of a new potential contributor or even a potentially influential artist years down the road.

Like we talked about in the performance section, if the students are there to serve the teacher rather than the other way around it places us in a position where the dynamic of these roles turns off potential flow-curious people and places negative pressure on the value of those lessons. Undervalued teaching means fewer students and fewer people interested in what we do.

The Dark Side of Validation

Thus far I’ve talked a lot about many of the consequences of validation as payment in more tangible aspects of the community, but I’d also like to take a moment to highlight some of the risks to the psychology of the community as well.

If you’ve been reading this and thinking that an ecosystem that thrives on endless validation and that avoids criticism at all costs sounds like a potential target for predators then you would be absolutely correct.

It surely doesn’t take a lot of work to connect some dots here--for people that thrive on taking advantage of others, it’s pretty easy to hold out the promise of validation as both a sword and a shield to get potential victims to both overextend themselves and/or compromise their own boundaries or needs in order to receive validation from someone they respect. This is basically an ideal target for narcissists and other manipulative personality types to be able to exploit people in the community while remaining immune to criticism in a community that’s afraid to criticize.

I have seen this happen first-hand...far too many times for comfort.

Even if this doesn’t make us attractive to narcissists it does make us a potential breeding ground for them. Again, when we build our businesses and culture on the availability of validation it also sends the message that seeking validation is a higher good. If people become trained to expect this as their feedback and payment for engaging with the community then it will also have an impact on how they engage with things outside the community.

It also leaves us vulnerable to trolls. There are vast amounts of people out there who derive pleasure solely from getting negative reactions out of others. A group of people that seeks out validation is also a perfect target for this type of behavior as undercutting the narrative of endless positive reinforcement is such an easy way for them to get their rocks off that it’s practically shooting fish in a barrel.

Conclusions

You may think that after all this that I'm against validation in any form and that is not the case. Without it I don’t know that any of us would participate in many of the things that we have in our lives, but it also cannot be the primary driver through which we as a culture organize ourselves.

Validation feels good, but accepting it as a form of compensation damages our industry, compromises its ability to grow, and artificially restricts the degree to which we can bring new people into our community.

It feels good for people who’ve bought into the ecosystem but it leaves those people unprepared for dealing with the outside world and worse it devalues the work of people who’ve devoted years to developing their skills as artists.

When they cannot find a way to make their art sustainable, they will move on to other things and our community loses potentially powerful influencers, artists, and entrepreneurs.

So many of us come from places where we have been made to feel less by many of the people around us. We may harbor anxieties about our competence, importance, or beauty and seek to fill the hole that has left us with. And the flow arts are good for that...but that high is temporary and you need to keep seeking it in order to fill the hole.

Be aware of what insecurities you hold onto that make you afraid to ask for more money or in some cases money at all. Realize those fears don’t just hold you back but hurt other artists in our niche as well.

I can see why it became so popular to make validation a cornerstone of our approach to compensating people. It’s certainly cheaper! And once you’ve bought into the ecosystem, you are a part of a culture that blankets you with praise without your having to take any risks or confront deeply held fears.

But it leads to fewer professional opportunities, poor-quality events, insufficient mentorship, and makes us attractive to predators. We can and we should do better.

Don’t accept validation as a form of payment. You are not helping your community by doing so--you’re hurting it.

Does that mean that the rest of us may find ourselves paying more to attend events or losing opportunities to receive validation ourselves? Yes. And it is absolutely worth the trade-off.

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* There are absolutely cases of online harassment that are gender based that I do not intend to reference here. The meme of having women in our community harassed and reduced to objects when they try to engage in conversations online is absolutely a thing. Here I’m trying to refer to cases where arguably good-faith (read: non-gender targeted among other things) criticism is met with bruised egos and defensiveness. Sexism in the community is absolutely a problem and a topic for another essay.

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