Making a living as an artist in the longest-lasting economic crisis since 1929 - And watching new projects coming up.
Most of the West is dealing with a big economic crisis started around 2006 with the Subprime mortgage crisis and not finished yet.
In Italy and in some other european countries (Greece, Spain, Iceland) that crisis has been particularly harsh and long. It means less money, fewer jobs - or no jobs for young people - many new poors.
For artists and people doing creative jobs, it's even more hard. We don't make essential supply or commodities. We don't bake bread or produce medicines. When most of people gets poorer, their priorities walk down a step on the hierarchy of needs.
But I'm going to talk about this in a next post. Today I just would tell you how I make a living as a not famous and not young artist.
I'm in 5 different jobs (pant!).
- I'm a painter and sculptor (professionally since 1991) and I sell my artworks (online on Artfinder, eBay and Saatchi)
- I make graphic design, such as logos, layout, ads.
- I teach Painting, Drawing and Modeling in my own courses
- I manage websites, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for a couple of companies. I also manage press offices and media communications for those companies.
- I occasionally design websites (and never find the time to update my own ones ;) )
These are my jobs, activities I am paid for. Then there are other projects that don't give me money at the moment. Let's put it aside now (I'll make a crowfunding post about them, perhaps).
Steemit is a little drop in the bucket of my incomes, and of course it's not a job at all. It doesn't mean I don't care about the rewards I get from it. Let's be honest: everyone cares. But I'm here especially because Steemit is a window to a possible future. And I always am curious to see the future.
(Btw, I'm also watching other projects growing up right now, such as Livepeer, Synereo, Akasha, Yours, Yoyow, Lunyr. Any more?)
Would you be interested by a network marketing system based on steem :
Solar coach
I'll check it thx :)
You are welcome !
Solar Coach Update – April 2017.
Great post. What system do you use to create websites? Or do you programm them from scatch?
thx.
well, I did just simple websites. usually I put Wordpress in the domain and then use its themes/plugins, adapting the html and the php on necessity.
(Hint: Maslow's "Need Hierarchy" has been pretty much debunked) Great article though! What Europe really needs to be focusing on right now is the debt bubble. The housing bubble that caused the turmoil of 2006-08 has a brand new baby brother. In Europe a year or so ago many corporations started issuing negative yield bonds...think about that! Why would anybody buy bonds with a negative yield??? (Unless you need a huge tax write-off) Now this is beginning to bleed over into sovereign bonds...that is a recipe for disaster. At least with the housing bubble, there are houses- some form of physical equity. With debt there is nothing tangible. UGH!!!
Italy has the biggest debt in Europe. The State pays interests on the debt selling more national bonds, that means more debt. Italian debt is bigger than Italy's gross domestic product. So I know what you talk about ;)
As regard Maslow's graph, I know it not accredited anymore, but I think it still works in its lower steps.
Well my friend, maybe someday we'll make it out of the "lower steps"!