Reasons Why Artists are Stalked by Unscrupulous Vultures

Why everyone thinks they can prey on artists

Is it just me? Am I the only one whose entire Insta feed is completely deluged by ads insisting they’re able to ‘make me take my art sales into five figures each month’ if only I pay them whatever delusional fee?

I didn’t come to an art career in any reasonable way. I fell into it backwards after tripping on a weirdly addictive Facebook game. (It’s a long weird story, you don’t wanna hear it). I was 33 at the time, with no formal education in art, wide eyed, full of ideas, very confused, and a prime candidate for impostor syndrome.

The first place that made me think I could even try to pivot my career to illustration was the old Threadless forum. Threadless as an online t-shirt company is still around, but the Threadless I stumbled into was a very different thing to what it is today. It was a weekly t-shirt design contest, with a thriving and extremely weird community attached. People would submit designs, everyone would vote on them, and out of the circa 500-600 weekly submitted designs, 7 would be selected for printing. Not necessarily according to the weekly vote. There was a bit of a sense of being Picked by the Gods. And those 7 artists would receive 2000$, each.

Considering I was living in a country where 2000$ was equivalent to 5 average monthly salaries, this seemed completely insane. Someone would give you thousands of dollars? For DRAWING A PICTURE??? I had to get in on this.

How hard could it be.

Obviously my first designs were desperately bad. I installed Illustrator and Photoshop and started fumbling with the interface, googling every step of the way. The only thing that kept me treading the surface, so to speak, were those blogs. It was a rowdy community, with lots of people who had known each other for years, had their own in-jokes and histories, and long weird conversations that were very intimidating to break into. But even though people were not always soft with their critiques, nor very welcoming at first, what they were was deeply committed to teaching you the things they knew, if you wanted to be taught.

So it was through the sheer kindness of strangers that I learned about screen printing color limitations, halftones, composition, and other arcane arts of what might make a winning t-shirt. I did end up getting printed, twice, before the Threadless business model changed and the forums died, but the main thing I walked away from those forums with was the firm knowledge that artists are weird, unique, and insanely generous people.

Nautilus - mechanical pencil drawing on smooth Bristol

As I blundered about trying to figure out what sorts of illustration were even out there, which ones had any hope of paying money, and to which ones my slowly emerging art style might be best suited, I started to spot a different sort of person that seemed to be extremely plentiful in every group where new artists congregated. For simplicity’s sake let’s call them the Vultures.

Many categories of people have their own Vultures - Hollywood has the paparazzi, home buyers have banks, sick people have faith healers and snake oil salesmen. Artists have… an entire entourage. From people offering to teach you how to ‘monetize your art business’, ‘find your art style’, and ‘get agency representation’, to people offering to promote your work in their magazine ‘for a small submission fee’, people offering to have your work judged by ‘industry experts’ in a curated competition ‘for a small submission fee’, people offering to show your work in an exclusive gallery where you will keep all the money from any potential sales, ‘for a small submission fee’.

The list goes on and on.

Join a community of likeminded artists and support each other in reaching your dreams of becoming successful full time artists! ….for a small submission fee. Sometimes honestly the fees weren’t even that small. There was a popular series of ‘art business’ courses that claimed to give you personalized one-on-one feedback from a successful art agent, and a chance to be taken on as an artist by that agent at the end. The course cost something like 600$, roughly. A couple of close friends took the plunge and signed up, hoping to fill out their portfolios, maybe get some solid industry advice. They were both bitterly disappointed.

The class numbered well over 500 students, so while the class group was full of chatter and ‘artists supporting each other’ (which we also tend to do for free in every other online space where artists congregate, without paying someone 600$ for the pleasure), the ‘personalized feedback’ was minimal, and delivered no powerful insight. It was quickly apparent that the particular agent had a ‘favorite’ art style, and only paid any attention to the artists who created in that particular, fairly commercially recognizable style. She did end up taking one girl on at the end of the whole thing, though I don’t know how lucrative an opportunity that turned out to be. The other 499 had effectively wasted their money.

You wouldn’t have known it, though, from the chatter in the online artist groups. These people presented themselves as prominent and important, and we all felt small and unsure of ourselves. Maybe if we weren’t gleaning amazing insights from these tips and briefs, it was us being too inexperienced, maybe we were uncultured swine failing to appreciate the pearls of wisdom our hundreds of dollars had bought us. Surely the emperor can’t be naked. We had heard so much about the fine patterns of his robes. But in private messages, occasionally someone would dare to admit it. That they felt they had wasted their money. That they don’t feel they had learned anything meaningful.

The more you paid for one of these courses, ‘jam-packed with amazing insight and valuable information’ - that was always the description, ‘jam-packed’ - the less you wanted to admit to yourself that you’d been had. It’s a vulnerable feeling. Over time we wizened up, and we learned to avoid the obvious traps - not the artist courses, oh no. Whenever an artist offers to teach you what they do, they will do their absolute best. Artists are sharers.

But all the agents, business consultants, art marketing experts, aesthetic trend analysts, creative networking facilitators, artistic vision coaches, visual narrative specialists, expressive brand communication managers and curatorial experience designers - they invariably deliver a long depressing mix of the vague, the inapplicable, and the obvious. ….For a small fee. Usually 499,99$, but at a special never-to-be repeated price just for you and only today, 49,99$. ‘Secure your spot now, because they’re filling up fast!!’

Bleurgh.

Shell - mechanical pencil drawing on smooth Bristol

The competitions, catalogues and magazines were even more inexplicable. We’ve all heard of that old line about social media, ‘if the product is free, you are the product’, but in these cases you actually had to pay to be the product. How does it make sense to pay to be considered for inclusion into a magazine that literally would not exist if it didn’t secure enough artwork to fill its pages? ‘Ah, but the visibility!!’ Ah yes, the visibility. The precious opportunity for your work to be shown to an audience so extensive, it doesn’t even make the magazine profitable, so the magazine has to charge you a submission fee. I have been featured in a few assorted illustration mags, way back when, the ones that didn’t ask me to pay for the opportunity, I wrote some guest articles, some tutorials, some industry event reports. And while it felt great, it brought no particular visibility with it.

Then there are those first clients that find you while you’re still fresh and green. ‘I wrote a children’s book and I want to self-publish but I really don’t have a large budget, could you do 30 full color spreads for 400$? We will split the profits once it starts selling!’ No, Bethany, no I cannot make a full-page illustration for 13$. You’re asking me to work for 60 cents per hour. That’s a weird number of pages anyway, not the standard number for a kids’ book. Oh, you want it in a style completely different from everything in my portfolio? I’m sorry, Bethany. You’ve got the wrong girl. Yes I’m sure I’m missing an amazing opportunity.

Of course you don’t say that. You take the job, because ‘It’s experience! It’s exposure!’ You usually never get the 400$. They change their mind and give up mid-way. Or they keep asking for changes. Or they take the illustrations and never pay. It’s all educational, I guess.

I don’t know why artists are so particularly alluring as targets for all types of scams. In some ways, it makes sense. We’re eager for validation, we are looking to prove something to others that we often don’t even believe ourselves - that we deserve to be paid for what we love doing. We wear our hearts on our sleeve, I think, more than other professions. We have to ‘put ourselves out there’. We’re all infected by impostor syndrome.

But we have to keep an eye out for the Vultures.

If she was really making 36,000$ per month selling art, she would not need to be selling you a course on how to do it. I know you. I know every time you see one of these you think, just for a split-second - what if? What if this one is actually good? What if this one would really help me grow my mailing list to over 10,000 interested buyers in two weeks? What if he really does know the secret trick no one will tell you about Instagram marketing for artists? They don’t, they won’t. As queen Elsa would say, let - it - go.

The reason we keep thinking there is a secret trick to making it big in the art world isn’t just because it feels like absolute alchemy. It’s because the one thing the human mind seems unwilling to accept is that there is no secret ingredient. No shortcut to losing weight without cutting calories, no secret tea that will ‘purify you from toxins and balance your hormones’, no special marketing technique that will make your art sell out overnight.

We just gotta sit here and struggle together, till we make it.

I’m in if you are.