Having been on Twitter for a little while now, I'm finding that the latest thing in artist funding is what's referred to as crowdfunding. Essentially the cyber-method of banging your tin cup loud enough, hoping that you can get enough people with five or ten bucks, because apparently, you'd have to be something just short of an artistic god to elicit any patronage from the people who really DO have a lot of money. And then probably kiss a lot of a*s to make it happen. I have never seen why it should have to be like this for artists, writers, and other creatives. What prevents Americans in particular from supporting the arts in some kind of organized way? Why are there starving artists? And I guess according to NPR, there are such things as starving lawyers these days; people who, have paid for a law school education, end up working at Starbuck's. While some might say that is poetic justice, in a sense, it is indicative, I think, of a larger dysfunction; in a right-thinking world, even if all the journalists were freelancers and bloggers, we'd still all be getting paid. I, for one, put a lot of money and sweat into my journalism-school education. Should I be doing this? I could definitely hope for more. Michaelangelo would have NEVER gotten anything done if he had to resort to crowdfunding. He'd be spending all his time attempting to raise money, and awareness about himself. But no. He had PATRONS; consistently rich, presumably consistently happy customers who put the buzz out about him, and made him an artistic rock star in his era. Think of that expression alone; rock star, an ARTIST whose fame and fortune are so super-powered it's become a word in our lexicon to describe ANYONE who is as such, no matter what they do. "Oh, in the world of professional video-gaming, he's a rock star." WHAT?! Apparently, we've given it all away, and working together is the only way we can ever hope to get any respect back