The Cost Of Hope in the Art World

In 2024, the creative industries contributed an estimated £145.8 billion to the UK’s GVA, with the arts subsector accounting for £11.4 billion. Yet much of that value doesn’t arise from straightforward art sales; it also reflects the many services artists are encouraged to purchase in pursuit of visibility, validation, and eventual sales.

Artists are not usually the wealthiest people, yet we are often the easiest to sell hope to. Many of these services are simply businesses doing what businesses do which is being transactional, but they are not always transparent about what they can realistically deliver, and the artist has to decide whether the cost is worth it.

Submissions exemplify these issues. While open calls have their place, they primarily function as revenue sources for galleries and organizers, who charge fees per entry and encourage multiple submissions. The selection process remains opaque: on major institutional calls, panels often divide entries among members, each reviewing only a portion before sharing notes, and artists rarely learn how final decisions are made. Thus, the promise of full-panel exposure seldom materialises. Artists also harbor suspicions that these panels lack the objectivity they claim.

Mentors and coaches can be helpful, but they are not always fully informed and can also steer artists towards their own tastes and agendas while charging handsomely for the privilege. The same caution applies to social media ‘experts’: Instagram, as one platform, is widely promoted as a route to sales and reach, but it is also crowded, performative, and easily gamed. In practice, artists often conclude that the time investment far outweighs any potential return.

Artist databases and opportunity platforms can be useful for keeping up with calls and deadlines, but they too are part of the same ecosystem of subscription services and paid access. Art fairs are another expensive gamble: they offer visibility, but often attract more browsers, fellow artists, and day-trippers than serious buyers, while the costs fall heavily on exhibitors.

The deeper problem is that artists are repeatedly told to ‘find their tribe’, build a brand, be consistent, network harder, and accept low odds as normal. Meanwhile, galleries and dealers tend to prefer to ‘discover’ artists rather than respond to direct approaches, which creates a built-in contradiction. For many artists, especially those outside the mainstream, the system can feel less like a marketplace than a series of costly gates.

The struggle is not imaginary. Fine art is an overcrowded field with low barriers to entry and no stable definition of quality, which leaves public taste, dealer confidence, and market fashion doing much of the sorting. All of which results in a market that often rewards visibility, novelty, or institutional backing more reliably than authenticity and depth of practice.

Alongside this we have unfortunately too often squandered the public’s goodwill, leaving viewers feeling foolish or excluded when a work refuses to yield meaning. The Turner Prize for example, increasingly irrelevant in tone and content, seems symptomatic of this disconnection: a spectacle sustained, as is much contemporary art, by journalistic appetite for provocation and novelty. I do not blame the public for bristling at such work. I have stood before pieces myself and felt not enlightenment but irritation at their obscurity and the apparent presumption that my considered attention is automatically owed.

Of course all artists would like their work to be seen and appreciated, but learn to accept that this is not a given. And yet they keep going, because making the work remains the point and stopping is never an option. For those whose practices are rooted in process, thought, and sustained engagement, the market can chase its own tail; the studio is where meaning is made.