I‘m writing this from a place of frustration.
I work with full time working artists all day every day. The kind who are painting in their living rooms at midnight, fighting for commissions from clients who might say no, rebuilding after shows that didn’t land the way they hoped. I see what it actually takes. And increasingly, I see what happens when someone has spent years and real money being told a different story.
Before I go further, a necessary distinction.
Romanticizing struggle is its own form of dishonesty, the kind that turns real pain into aesthetic and sells it back to people as inspiration. That is not what I am doing. What I am describing is a structural reality. The difficulty is not incidental to becoming an artist. It is not a rite of passage you endure and then graduate from. It is the actual mechanism by which the necessary skills are built. You cannot acquire decade-level judgment in a weekend. You cannot develop the instincts required to survive this industry without having survived something. The struggle is not the price of admission. It is the education itself. Which is precisely why you cannot buy it.
There is nothing wrong with learning how to run a business, quite the contrary. Artists need to understand posting schedules, pricing strategy, how to close a sale, how to write a bio that actually works. These are real skills. If you are buying a course that teaches you how to optimize your Instagram and you know exactly what it is, a practical tool for a specific problem, fine. Buy it. Use it. Move on. Some of them are legitimately good, as long as you understand they have a shelf life.
There is nothing wrong with building a volume business. An artist selling affordable work, generating enough income to quit a job, supporting their family through their work, that is genuinely good. I have no argument with that.
My argument is with the promise. With the person who takes the language of the arena, gallery representation, institutional recognition, markets, serious collecting, and sells it as the destination of a $297 course. Who takes the vocabulary of a career built over decades in rooms most people never access and packages it as something you can download before the next cohort closes.
That is the lie. Not the Instagram tips. The promise of what those tips will get you.
