Seth Godin's blog post about Revisiting conspicuous consumption may be an answered prayer for those of us who are artists and craftsmen...
Rich people will always indulge the desire to stand out, but I wonder if there's a new version:
Spending on and investing in time, not stuff.
And it's not so wasteful, this focus on craftsmen.
The new trend in spending money is to buy things that are painstakingly hand built instead of efficiently mass produced. It might not be a better price than what you could buy at Target, but the very fact that you can pay for an artisan to create it, an artist to design it, a talented worker to bring it to life--that act makes a powerful statement about what you can afford and what's important to you. Instead of a bigger house, it's a house that's built from scratch by craftsmen. Instead of a bigger steak, it's a handmade dish of local poached vegetables...
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