Bohemian venues paid performers by audience-donation baskets pitched at the door

Evidence

Poets read for free. The musicians who initially served to clear the house expected to get something. One step up from busking, the Gaslight was a “basket house,” a venue that paid the talent from the money audience would pitch in at the door. When a cover charge was established, some were paid by the week, although conditions did not necessarily improve. Even dressed up with some hanging imitation Tiffany lamps, the place, according to its frequent performer and eventual manager, Dave Van Ronk, a bearish, Brooklyn-born twenty-four-year-old high school dropout, was “hopelessly filthy”—a ratand roach-infested tenement basement. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 260

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘basket house’ — a crucial economic mechanism of the scene: talent paid from door donations, one step above busking. This is exactly the material condition the reader seeks.
• XREF: Basket-house economics connects to the reader’s test case for ‘why culture stagnates now’ — the material poverty that subsidized invention then versus the rent/attention economy now.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the basket house as incubator’ — how structurally degraded payment mechanisms (door donations, passing the hat) were what made world-historical art possible, inverted by today’s platform economics.