The Perfume Makers - Rudolf Ernst

@yomimosoy, I appreciate your kindness, and I am happy you have enjoyed it! Honestly your enjoyment of the art is the BEST payout I receive on this platform, sadly I have only gotten 5-6 such comments. All the images I got were from doing research through several websites:

http://www.arthistory.net/artists/
https://www.the-athenaeum.org
https://www.wikipedia.org (many images were gathered from wikimedia commons)

@yomimosoy, Be advised that I am currently being attacked and flagged for sharing art and promoting it. I would hate for you to have high hopes, to commit serious effort to curating art on Steemit/Busy, only to be attacked for your work, stripped of any earnings. (Yes, you can be stripped of your earnings -- if a more powerful user with a lot of money invested in steem determines that your contribution to the network is "abusive" they can "demonitize" your posts, which can cause you to lose money and your reputation score will be seriously affected.)

I have kept careful track of how much I spent on promotions, and apparently earning a few pennies, (I have lost money on promoting posts too) for weeks of work researching and curating and sharing is considered "abuse", "capitalism" and "evil". Yet people can take pictures of their dinner, or a dandelion on their lawn, or worse, they promote their post about their "Drug Wars" or "Steem Monsters" game match, and promote it and the Steem Censors are totally okay with it, because its "original work" -- despite the fact that it is by definition, mediocre, banal, common, vacuous, trite, superficial, useless, valueless.

For reference, if I spend $20 or$ 30 to promote my post, and I earn $0.45 cents after payout, apparently that makes me a target for abuse and attacks... I have risked$ 550 in Steem holdings, and earned $18.88 dollars profit (a 3% reward). These rewards and my Steem holdings are subject to the market volatility, so my numbers may not be exact, I may be more or less close to breaking even. If I am very lucky I will be able to get back my initial investment without any loss, but it will take 3 months to divest completely and during that entire period I will be subject to the whims of the market. The risk to reward ratio is ridiculously high, whether your spend years writing original posts and earn a few cents, or whether you use vote/bid bots to promote your post.

It is very discouraging to try and bring something of beauty and culture that I love and appreciate to the community, to promote it to visibility (instead of just remaining unknown and unviewed because no one knows I even exist).

Some people on this platform have a huge erection for censorship on their "free and democratic network". Their sense of entitlement and self righteousness is laughable. These same people who are flagging me, who are attacking me for being a capitalist, are earning "flag rewards" -- meaning they are being paid for their censorship. I have zero respect for paid snitches, and that is exactly what they are. They don't add any value to the network, they get paid to act as the morality police and act like they are morally superior while they look down on me, and speak to me like I am a child.

The message is clear, the Steem Censors tell me I am unwelcome. It is depressing, demoralizing and discouraging to experience the attacks I have here on Steemit/Busy. I was curating art on Instagram, but Instagram's censorship drove me off the platform when they banned several posts of art I had curated because they showed a female nipple (a lot of classical art involves nudes or partially nude people), and then Instagram sent me condescending warning messages threatening to permanently ban my account if one more infraction occurred. I came to Steem in the hopes of finding a more welcoming audience, but it turns out I was wrong. I don't have interest in fighting an ideological battle with the self-righteous censors and would prefer to leave this network to its own mediocre demise. I fear that the only winners on this network are the very early investors who were able to acquire millions of steem while the price was extremely low, they are the whales on this network, and those people aren't interested in seeing plankton level members rise to share in the wealth, instead most of the whales on this network dump their share of steem on the bid/vote bots in order to earn a tidy 10-15% return on their investment. But I don't see any of the censors attacking or flagging them for passively enabling the bid/vote bot systems in the first place.

I believe this is the end of my participation in Steem. I will be divesting all the Steem I hold and using it to start my own art-history website, where I can monetize my passion without being attacked as a "plagiarist". The upside is at least I am only losing a month's worth of effort instead of years worth of effort.

Step carefully my friend, I wish you the best.