AxeMan’s skills have gone a bit rusty, but he is anxious to get back in a groove. He doesn’t want to rest on his laurals. He tried writing fiction for a number of years, was even published under a pseudonym, but he felt that telling the truth would better serve him. So, back to making ‘art’ which is a very risky business these days. He has read that the National Endowment for the Arts has been tracking numbers of artists in the workforce (including self-employed). There are roughly 2.1 million fine artists, illustrators, photographers and animators in the workforce as of their 2011 study. He wonders, why bother?