Predatory art institutions

If you are an artist, chances are that some ad will pop up on you on Facebook or in a newsletter you are subscribed to, advertising art funding or a chance to sign up for the festival. You follow the link and read the conditions. There is a fee you are supposed to pay to get a chance to become famous, receive funding, and have your film screened at big festivals. You hesitate.

In the scientific community there is similar fenomena of predatory journals. You pay to apply with your paper for publication. Problem is when the publication fees become the primary motivation of the journal’s existence. In order to drive larger profits, reviewers will not properly evaluate your work and simply publish all of them to encourage even more people to send their papers. Vicious circle continues. Academic community fights against these predatory journals by creating a list of approved journals that are verified and also creating a blacklist of predatory journals you should avoid.

Even more alarming are Instagram accounts that are showcasing other artists’ work. On one hand artists should be happy that they are being promoted, on the other viewers will most likely follow the showcase channel, not the individual artist. In the end such showcases become parasites — living out of other people content, amassing followers and becoming gatekeepers that nobody asked for. And we are not even talking about scraping other artist content to train neural networks on the style of the artist without their permission.

It is not ok to pay for your own work as an artist and such business models should not be tolerated. Beware of these predatory practices.

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