Online Vanity Galleries, Fake Followers, and the Exploitation of Artists

Every artist I know carries the same personal hope. We want our work to be seen. We want it to mean something to someone we have never met. We want the years spent learning to draw, to paint, to compose, to write, to be recognised as the discipline they are. That hope is honest and human. But it is also the exact place where we are most easily exploited, because anyone who wants to take advantage of an artist knows precisely which door to knock on. They knock on the door marked "attention," and far too often, we open it without asking who is really standing there. Then the problems of online vanity galleries, fake followers, and the Exploitation of artists arise.

Fake Advert promoting a fake event for a fee

The internet has multiplied this problem beyond anything previous generations of artists faced. Spend an hour looking at your inbox or your messages as a working artist, and you will find a familiar parade: pseudo-galleries, mysterious "international art organisations," curators of festivals you have never heard of, all of them offering recognition in exchange for a fee. The promises are intoxicating precisely because they speak to that honest hope. They will hang your work in a prestigious city. They will introduce you to serious collectors. They will place your name among the artists who matter. And all it will cost you is a "modest participation fee," a "catalogue contribution," a "selection charge." It is a business model built entirely on our longing to be noticed, and it preys above all on the most hopeful among us.

I want to be clear about something, because the line can be genuinely confusing for a young artist. There is nothing wrong with paying for a service that delivers real value. A printer charges to make prints. A good framer charges for framing. A legitimate art fair charges for booth space, and everyone involved understands what they are buying. The problem is not the existence of a fee. The problem is the false promise wrapped around the fee, the suggestion that money alone will transform you into a recognised artist, when in reality the only thing being transformed is the contents of your bank account.

The same pattern repeats with online magazines. I have lost count of how many times I have been approached by a publication offering to write a glowing feature article, for a price. They speak of their enormous readership, their influence, and their reach into the collector class. They show you screenshots and impressive-sounding numbers. But here is the uncomfortable truth: no one can verify any of it. You cannot see who actually reads the magazine, whether those readers buy art, or whether the publication has any standing at all in the eyes of the people whose opinion matters. You pay, the article appears, and then nothing happens. The traffic was never real, or it was real but utterly indifferent to your work. You have bought the appearance of recognition rather than recognition itself, and the difference between those two things is everything.

This problem is more visible for those of us who live and work far from the major art centres. When you are based in a remote country like Mauritius, a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the struggle to be seen abroad is real and constant. We do not bump into Parisian gallerists at openings, and we do not share a studio building with London critics. That distance makes the promise of instant international exposure even more seductive, and it is precisely why the vanity galleries and the pay-to-publish magazines target artists like us so eagerly. They know how badly we want a bridge to the wider art world, and they sell us a counterfeit one. The remoteness is real, and the longing is real, but the bridge they offer leads nowhere.

Fake advert for the boost of Instagram followers

Then there is the question of followers. Companies appear, constantly, promising to "boost your Instagram" or "grow your audience" overnight. For a fee, they will deliver thousands of new followers to your account. And technically, they do. The number climbs. It feels wonderful for about a week. But those followers are not collectors, not critics, not gallerists, not even people who particularly like art. Many of them are not people at all. They do not comment with any understanding; they do not share your work with anyone who might care; they do not walk into a gallery; and they certainly do not buy a painting. What you have purchased is a vanity metric, a larger number sitting next to your name that does nothing whatsoever to advance your career. Worse, an account padded with inactive or fake accounts can actually damage your reach, because the platform's algorithm notices that your "audience" never engages. You have paid money to make yourself look more popular while quietly becoming less visible to the people who matter.

All of these schemes share one thing in common. They monetise the gap between how much we want recognition and how patient the real path to recognition actually is. The real path is slow. It is built on genuine relationships, on years of consistent work, on word of mouth from people who actually love what you do, on the occasional honest gallerist who believes in you, on collectors who return because the first piece they bought still moves them. None of that can be purchased. The moment someone offers to sell it to you, your suspicion should rise rather than your excitement.

But exploitation does not come only from strangers on the internet. Some of it comes from the people around us, and it sometimes takes a more wounding form. So many people I have met simply do not believe that art is a "real" job. To them, what we do is a hobby that happens to take all our time, a pleasant pastime rather than a profession that deserves to be paid. And because they have decided it is not real work, they feel entirely comfortable asking us to do it for free. "Could you just paint a little something for the event?" "Could you come and do a live painting?" "It will be good publicity for you." The assumption underneath every one of these requests is that our time, our training, and our talent carry no real cost, and that we should be grateful merely to be asked.

This is the part that stings, because it is rarely meant cruelly. The people asking are often kind, well-intentioned, and genuinely unaware of the pain their request causes. They would never walk into a bakery and ask for free bread in exchange for "exposure." They would never ask a plumber to fix a pipe in exchange for a mention on social media. But somehow, when it comes to art, the normal rules of value and exchange evaporate. We are expected to give our work away precisely because we love it, as though love of the work cancels out the costs, the materials, the decades of practice, and the simple right to be paid for what we do.

So I have come to rely on a single test, and I share it with every artist who will listen. "Whenever someone or some company asks you to make an artwork or carry out a creative intervention, ask yourself one question: Is this a genuine win-win, or does it only benefit the other party?" Sometimes the answer is a clear win-win, and those collaborations are wonderful: a project that pays fairly and shows your work to the right people, a partnership where both sides give and both sides receive. But very often, when you look honestly, you realise that all the benefit flows in one direction. They gain a beautiful piece, free decoration, content, prestige, or the use of your name. And you gain a vague promise of "exposure," or the promise that in the future your work will be purchased by someone else and make the whole journey worthwhile.

Asking that question does not make you difficult or arrogant. It makes you a professional. And this is the heart of what I want to say: "We must not sell ourselves short." Not for hypothetical fame, not out of fear that no better offer will come, not because someone has made us feel that wanting to be paid is somehow ungrateful or unspiritual. The work has value. We have value. Acting as though we do not is the surest way to convince everyone else of the same thing.

And here is the final point, the one I would put up on a wall if I could. Step back and look at the world around you. Look at the chair you are sitting in, the clothes you are wearing, the building you are in, the film you watched last night, the song that has been stuck in your head all week. Without artists, there would be no design of any kind. No fashion. No films, no series, no music, no songs, no concerts. No decoration, no beauty arranged with intention, no art of any sort. Strip every trace of the artistic hand out of human life, and what remains is grey, functional, and almost unbearable to live in. Art is not a decorative extra layered on top of a serious world. It is woven through everything that makes life worth living.

So why are we artists so often taken for granted? I do not have a tidy answer, except to say that it usually comes from people who have never paused to imagine the world without us. Our task, then, is not to beg for that recognition but to refuse the bad bargains, value our own work plainly, and keep making things so undeniable that the question answers itself.