Everybody Loves You When You’re Dead
My good friend Benny Gold closed his San Francisco store in the Mission over two years ago. It was a beautiful store that was both a retail space representing his eponymous brand, but also a place of community where he had regular office hours to help young up and coming designers. Every time we’d hang out and walk down Valencia, somebody would stop him and ask for a selfie. He is truly a Bay Area street wear legend.
As he was closing his store, he said something that has stuck with me ever since. He was talking about the outpouring of love and sadness from his fans when they heard that his store was closing. He had one of his best ever sales day during the closing process and everything was selling out. As he was reflecting on all of it, he said to me, “Everybody loves you when you’re dead”.
And it’s true. People don’t know what they have until it’s gone and then it’s too late. Not only for the fans who may have wanted to visit Benny Gold’s store in person before it closed, but also for Benny too. Maybe the store could have been saved if more of those fans had come by the store, but then again maybe not. But knowing that it was all coming to an end, it got a lot of those fans off their couches and walking into the store one last time. One last photo at the “Stay Gold” entrance steps.
It’s something I think about a lot these days as we move towards a creator-centric world. Platforms like Patreon and Substack are built on the model that you don’t need millions of people to make a living, you only need a 1000 true fans. As people start to think about which artists and creators to support, they are often asking themselves what value does this piece of art have for me right now? Did I get any value out of today’s post from this Substack journalist? I think the better question would be, would I be sad if this artist or writer stopped creating art or writing articles? Or to take it a step further, would I be truly upset if this artist or writer died?
If we think about that future and we don’t like it, it’s better to act on that today than to be caught by surprise in the future, wondering what we could have done to prevent it. It’s hard to get a sense for that type of loss when you first start reading or enjoying somebody’s work, but over time it’s something that you should ask yourself every once in a while. I think it’s an easier question to answer for bigger institutions like the New York Times or MoMA. It’s obvious that it would be a huge loss to society if either of those no longer existed. But for the smaller artist and journalist, it’s a trickier question. It’s the question that many of them will have to get their 1000 true fans to answer. They have to make them feel that future loss as if it were happening tomorrow, so that they act today. And that I think will be a critical piece that will determine which creators succeed in the long term. How do you make them feel that loss, how do you get them to act, how do you reward them for taking that action.
I’m sure many will have answers to that question from traditional marketing to new technologies like non-fungible tokens (yes I did mention it, but it’s true!), but whatever it is, it’s something that creators need to figure out. It may feel narcissistic, it may feel icky, but don’t you want your fans to mourn your loss like the world did when Robin Williams or Prince died? I don’t think you want them to not care and just go on with their lives, I think you want them to reflect on your work and value it even more since there will be nothing else that will be ever be created by you ever again.
It’s a weird time travel trick creators will have to play on their fans. Sort of like Scrooge in the Christmas Carol. The finance world has this all figured out with concepts like time value of money and futures exchange. The creative world also needs to figure it out too, so that it can create a better future for itself that will properly value the work that they create.
