Hi to all my backers.

I’ve been in touch with a couple of people close to the center of the Shaver Mystery, and my most recent conversations with them have led me to conclude that I need to reconfigure my project a bit. The scope needs to be wider in one sense (to include material from other areas of fringe culture that resonate with Shaver’s ideas), and narrower in another (to focus more on Shaver as a visual artist).

The side effects of this decision are: 1) that a project with an already long time frame has mushroomed into something that may sprawl on endlessly; and 2) the need for immediate seed money seems less pressing in light of that. Projects like this have a tremendously deferred payoff for bystanders—books of this sort can take years to research and write, after all—and that also bothered me a bit. Therefore, I am planning to take down my Shaver Mystery Kickstarter page and suspend funding later tonight.

However, this does not mean that I have abandoned Kickstarter. Although I’ve never been comfortable in the role of palm-out fundraiser, the idea of using Kickstarter as a venue for profitless conceptual art intrigues me. Therefore, I have created and launched a project called “Fund Nothing” that employs Kickstarter’s rules and structure to present an artwork that will yield zero proceeds for me, and a dollar’s worth of meaningless collectible ephemera for everyone else. It’s a stubbornly frivolous piece, with the spectre of the Recession hovering and moaning over it. As far as I know, it’s also the first attempt to repurpose Kickstarter as a virtual exhibition space.

Here’s the URL: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/167925853/fund-nothing

My work on Richard Shaver is also not over. In the short term, I plan to continue my blog project of writing a primer on the Shaver Mystery, after which the Shaver Mystery Project will be devoted to occasional posts on his art. Once the primer is complete, I will also be spinning my work off into two other blogs. The first will be called “Remembering Lemuria,” and will deal with the wider history of homespun American fringe religions. The second will be more closely related to the field of art criticism, and will scavenge its ugly name (to be revealed later) from an old creative writing blog that I sent into hiding after 2006. These blogs will go live over the next couple of weeks. If you’re interested in either of them, you can e-mail me for more information at jeffedwardsjc@yahoo.com.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have pledged money toward this project. Your support is deeply and genuinely appreciated, and I hope we cross paths again.

Take care.

Jeff