Blog / 2023 / How to Sell Art on Instagram (The Article I Never Wrote)

In a recent post on Art Marketing Blog* I was cited as a source. Specifically, Art Marketing Blog refers to my article “How to Sell Art on Instagram” that I published on Artwork Archive.

Except I never wrote an article about how to sell art on IG. Not on my site, not anywhere. As I explained in this video, I got on the platform pretty late, and, even when I was on socials—which I’m not anymore—I never liked the idea of tailoring my art business advice to one company’s platform. And while it’s true that Artwork Archive mentions me in a couple of its articles, I never published anything with them.

My first thought was “silly spammy web!” Someone is writing a half-baked article looking for clicks, and they think using my name will lend them credibility. After all, this is exactly what the copywriters at Artwork Archive were doing when they used my name and one of my videos.

But, moments later, the artificially intelligent penny dropped in my very human mind:

ChatGPT knows who I am.

Art Marketing Blog’s post, “Selling Art on Instagram: A Beginner’s Guide,” has zero personality. It’s not a bad summary, just repetitive and bland in its word choice. What’s more, it contains garbled info about Artwork Archive and me, and that’s a hallmark of text that’s generated by AI.

So ChatGPT (or whatever program Art Marketing Blog uses) thinks I’m important enough to lie about. I’m a little flattered, like when an AI image generator knew what the “Gwenn Seemel painting style” looked like, but I’m also a little freaked out. I mean, I was already nervous about how ChatGPT and the like were going to turn the garbage content up to eleven on the web, but now it feels personal.

So, what’s an internet-savvy artist to do?

Commit to your own website.

By that I mean you should update your site as often as you post on Instagram. I’m serious: please stop telling people that IG is where to get the latest news about you—because that’s what you’re telling them when you update your Insta more than your site.

If that doesn’t feel doable, at the very least I recommend building a one-page website which you own. It should give people a small sample of your work and then encourage them to sign up for your mailing list, which you should send messages to at least once a month, like clockwork. Also, you should consider setting up a news alert for your own name—it’s how I learned about Art Marketing Blog. News alerts are explained in greater detail in this post.

In a world where AI is increasingly flooding the web with mangled mimicries of human-produced culture, you need to make it clear to anyone who’s interested in what you’re doing that there’s one sure place on the web where they can get real news on the art you actually make as well as the articles you actually write.