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I turned off my Instagram and the other one for all of January. Just to see. Had 2,400 followers, which I'd been half-maintaining for years out of some sense that I had to. Nobody noticed. Not one message. My Etsy orders didn't change. The gallery that carries my work emailed about something else entirely. Two things came out of it. One, I'm not going back to posting three times a week for an audience that wasn't there. Two, it cost me nothing, and that's both freeing and a bit humbling. The people who actually buy my work found me through the gallery, through word of mouth, through a craft fair in November. Not through my hashtags. I'm not saying online doesn't work. It clearly does for plenty of people. But I'd built my whole week around a platform that didn't care whether I was on it or not. That's a strange thing to have done for a decade.

There was a print fair in Leipzig two weekends ago, small, mostly German editions dealers and a few of us artists. I brought thirty etchings, three editions, and I had this spreadsheet before I went, mentally, about which ones to push because they did well on Instagram. The "engagement" ones, the moody close-ups people save. You know what sold? Not those. It was the piece I almost didn't pack, a silly little riso of a basil plant, because someone's grandmother in Bologna might have grown basil and it made them laugh. Three people stopped just to tell me it reminded them of a kitchen. One bought it. I keep thinking about that gap. The internet told me people wanted the dark architectural work. The room told me they wanted a basil plant and five minutes of talking about their nonna. I've been optimizing for the wrong audience because the online one is the only one that gives me numbers. The fair gave me 600 visitors on a Sunday and I learned more than a year of analytics. Not sure I have a tidy solution. Just noticing that the algorithm has quietly become my gallerist and I'm not sure I hired it.

I had a piece in a group show last spring. Small gallery, decent neighborhood foot traffic. They took 40% commission. That's fine, I know the deal, rent's real. But I also had to pay for my own framing. Print the postcards myself. Supply the wine for the opening. They asked if I could "activate my network" on social and tag them in stories every day leading up to it. So I'm paying to make the work, paying to present it, doing their marketing for them, and they take 40% of whatever sells. And I walked away thinking I was lucky to be there. I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm still trying to figure out which part of this is normal and which part is getting played. Because I keep hearing about how the model is broken for artists but I don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just "go viral on tiktok" which is its own kind of nonsense.