Cruisin the Farmer's Market for Grey Poupon

Making it on Etsy

The notions of overindulgence, undiversified market choice and all-the-eggs-in-one-basket in the approach to the craft market must be discarded. Just as one would buy low and sell high, choose LLC structure to partnership or sole proprietorship, or fail to listen to one’s superiors when they suggest overinvestment in your company’s stock, one must not rely on Ebay-lite for one’s sole income whether it is based in one-of-a-kind craft production or not. However much like the trajectory of sites like Ebay, the star of Etsy will shine brighter until some sunny day when some may find their own gilt pyramid scheme among the genuine articles; that is, if it fails to flicker in the current economic squall.

Umbrage with ‘validation through patronage’ is an easy thing to accept but hard to negotiate. Indeed the dominant cultural model remains material wealth through conformist/non-conformist monetary gain, the unquenchable thirst accompanying the frenzied hypercapitalist (Graham, Hypercapitalism) overconsumption model. Under the specter of unlimited commodification, the notion of inevitable subsumption weighs heavily on all the arts and sciences, intellectual pursuits and especially on the participant/spectator in the disturbing non-site heterotopia (Foucault, Of Other Spaces) that is the system of tubes. The conclusion one must arrive at remains one of “confusion” and “hopeless powerlessness” tempered by the acknowledgement that such “knowledge products” have been sold by mere men.
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Technically, the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a mere symptom/exacerbation of the natural rising debt-sourced market bubble that results from the rising wage gap that occurs when wages trail productivity and naturally result in ballooning unsecured debt, exponential profit and market instability fed by an encouragement of further debt from lowered Fed rates (Batra, Greenspan’s Fraud). Suspicion should arise when a market historically takes a hundred years to reach one thousand yet only one decade to surpass fivefold let alone to subsequently double in less than that. Unfortunately until systemic/regulatory reform takes place, bailouts will only dampen if not exacerbate the deflation and those few whom own will face lower returns while they watch the rest of us fight among the rubbish.
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The Aporia
Talking with the non-superstar veteran studio artists (from painters to jewelers), one encounters not only the indomitable drive to create continuously but also the zeal to subsist however one can. In the end, the artist is far from a capitalist, despite aspirations. Until one can mount the vertical monopoly in the craft world, the field remains a romantic worldview that places what one must do before what one feels/fears the market will bear. For some, one must lose the hand-craft, others the practice itself, still there remains the option of alternate/subsistence income to divide your energies and test your vigilance for the process/action/practice.
Until the States see a necessity for federally-funded individual creativity, the free-thinker will be relegated to an Einstein at the Drive-Thru, and thus consequently will remain light-years behind in innovation and industry, let alone the artworld.

Like litter-on-a-stick, Etsy is indeed a “beacon of hope” in the corporate vacuum, a looming icon of the first step in the establishment of Craft in the public consciousness. The question becomes one of empire or confederation, market or community, didacticism or Greedomics. Only through joint forces with the likes of Adbusters, Reverend Billy and other established counterculture factions will any real progress/effectiveness become visible. If the execs can sell corporate personhood and persecution and effective political action to fundamentalists, surely the pragmatists can realize concerted conscionable sustainability among a small faction of informed citizens.

Act quickly, craft globally.
-Sheldon Marx-Guggenheim