Art and the Economy

I find myself looking at the bills, and it hits home that the art market is not what it used to be. The art market is there for a select few; the few that have the contacts and that know someone. The rest of us are struggling to survive.
It's not just the gallery scene, because lots of those have closed. It's the shrinking middle class, that class used to be the staple for the regular artist, but no longer. As the middle class has disappeared, the money that they used to purchase luxuries like art has dried up and blown away.

This leaves many of us out in the cold. Prices are now often too low to buy more supplies. Because of the economy that is not recovering, artists are now worse off, in my opinion, than they were before the Great Depression. But there is no New Deal coming to save us.