Why AI shouldn’t write your artist statement — and why it’s welcome to write so many of the other things eating up countless precious hours of your week.
In June, on Instagram, I asked people who work in culture how exhausted they are by their job. There was only one answer: 100% of them said TOO MUCH.
I asked what was draining them, specifically. Half said visibility and PR. The other half — being pulled in too many directions at once. I asked what was blocking them most from moving forward. Half said lack of money. The other half — I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START. I asked how optimistic they are about the second half of 2026. The emoji slider stopped on the far left — on the 😀 that sits exactly on NOT AT ALL.
In a parallel LinkedIn poll, artists, gallerists, and museum professionals agreed: the biggest challenge in 2026 is access to funding (50%), then capacity (25%), then finding buyers and audience (25%). Visibility got a clean zero — which doesn’t mean they don’t need it; it means they don’t even think of it as a real line item in the budget.
The longest single response in our 2026 arts and culture sector survey [1] came from a curator. In one sentence, without irony, she described the job she does: writing press releases, coordinating loans, designing invitations, running social media, organizing artwork transport, finding sponsors, talking to artists. All of it done by one person, on a single salary, under one job description that somewhere along the way quietly grew into five — five that really ought to be handled by five different people.
There’s a phrase I’ve been hearing from gallerists and museum staff almost weekly, for years now: I’M THE ONLY ONE DOING THIS. [2] Not as a complaint — as a fact. Something that has become so normal it isn’t even noticed anymore.
This piece is about that — and about one tool that can give you back a few hours a week, if you know how to use it. And that can drain you completely if you don’t.
The false escape
The easiest reaction to this level of exhaustion sounds something like: well, AI is here — let it write everything for me. Let it write the press release, let it write the statement for my portfolio, let it write the website copy. If I can claw back three hours this week by asking ChatGPT to write me an artist statement, why not?
I’ll tell you why not — for two reasons, one very practical and one a bit deeper.
THE PRACTICAL REASON
We’ve sat on a number of juries and selection committees that received artist portfolios that were grammatically flawless — but had nothing to do with the work. The artists hadn’t written them. An AI tool had, often with no human editing in between. The technique was nailed reasonably well. Composition, more or less. But the description of one abstract painter could just as easily have described a dozen other abstract painters. [3]
We tested an AI tool ourselves once — one that publicly claims to write “specifically about your art,” based on uploaded photos of the work. We loaded in pieces by several different artists and asked for statements. The result: text that could have described any of ten other artists. The AI couldn’t place the work in an appropriate art-historical context. It didn’t know the details of the making process — which, for some artists, is the heart of the work. Those details aren’t in the photograph. They come out of conversation, and critical thinking.
And that — conversation and critical thinking — is the difference between an artist statement that sounds like it came out of some kind of statement-vending machine, and one that gets to the heart of what you actually do.
THE DEEPER REASON
In June 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint of a study in which they measured the brain activity of 54 participants writing essays — one group with no tools, one using a search engine, one using ChatGPT. The group that leaned on ChatGPT most heavily showed the lowest cognitive activity, weaker recall of what they had just written, and — perhaps most importantly — the lowest sense of ownership over the essay. People who let AI write the essay for them didn’t experience it as theirs, even when they had handed it in themselves. [4]
The study is a preprint, the sample is small, take it with appropriate caveats. But the direction is clear.
To sum up: AI can write you an artist statement that sounds flawless and doesn’t represent you. And when someone asks you — at an opening, say, or simply over a coffee — why this material, why now, what you’re trying to say with your work, you can easily find yourself with no answer.
The question: what do you WANT to be doing?
A moment of honesty, please.
Most of the arguments in the “AI must stay out of culture” tradition end up handing people who are already exhausted one more reason to feel guilty when, on a Friday at 5pm, they ask ChatGPT to write them a social media post anyway. That helps no one.
The more practical question, which I’d suggest you ask yourself at least once a month, goes like this:
WHAT DO I, ACTUALLY, WANT TO BE DOING THIS YEAR? AND WHAT DON’T I?
The lists tend to split sharply. Most people in culture WANT TO — research, write about works, talk to artists, curate, teach, organize exhibitions that get remembered. They DON’T WANT TO — fill out the same expense sheet for the fifteenth time, manually copy data into Excel, read 87 emails a day, six of which are urgent, write three versions of the same press release for the same event.
Once you have those two columns, AI becomes much less of a philosophical question. It becomes a concrete one: can I ethically move something from the “don’t want” column over to AI, so I have more time for the “want” column?
The answer is: to a fairly large extent, yes. Here are six things I get AI to do for me — or to do beside me, which is something different.
1) A PRESS RELEASE BASED ON AN INTERNAL TEMPLATE
I’ll show this one in full, because it’s the easiest to get wrong.
I have an internal press release template — a structure I’ve developed over the years, shaped by the many press releases I’ve read and admired, and by the professional literature on writing in general and on writing about art in particular. [5] When we have a new exhibition, I don’t ask Claude (the AI tool I use most) to “write a press release.” I ask this:
Below you’ll find, attached: our internal press release template (1), the curatorial text for the exhibition (2), and the exhibition details (3). Your task: fill in the template (1) using the information from (2) and (3). Do not change the structure of the template. Do not add statements like “the work engages with…” (insert here any other generic phrases you want to avoid) unless that exact phrasing appears in the curatorial text. Double-check every date, artist name, sponsor, organization, institution, and venue before you put it in. If a detail is missing, leave “[MISSING]” rather than inventing it. Write in clear, literary prose, and reach for specialist terms only where the curatorial text itself uses them. Write in flawless (insert language of choice) paying attention that the language sounds natural. Include foreign words only if they were used as such in the curatorial foreword.
(1) [template]
(2) [curatorial text]
(3) [list of works, dates, venue]
The difference between this prompt and the prompt “write me a press release for an exhibition about _______” is dramatic. The first hands you a draft that needs five minutes of polishing. The second hands you something you have to throw out and start over.
The rule: the more context and structure you give an AI tool, the less it invents — and the more it sounds like your voice.
2) TRACKING GRANTS AND OPEN CALLS.
I use ClickUp Brain (the AI function inside ClickUp, a project-management tool) to monitor a list of sources — the Ministry of Culture, Creative Europe, local public calls, the newsletters I’m subscribed to — in combination with Claude, and flag the ones relevant to the areas I actually work in. AI doesn’t write the application. It compresses an hour of searching into five minutes of reading.
3) EMAIL TRIAGE
Monday morning, I run a recurring prompt: go through all new emails from the last seven days, pull out the ones I urgently need to reply to, ignore newsletters and notifications. Clients and collaborators get a faster reply.
4) PROJECT-BRIEF SUMMARIES BEFORE AN APPLICATION
When I’m considering a grant application, I give the AI tool all the materials first (the call, the criteria, our work plan) and ask for a three-sentence summary: what they’re asking for, what we’re offering, where those two overlap. If the overlap isn’t obvious from the summary, I don’t submit — or I need to reframe it. That’s two days saved on an application I shouldn’t have written in the first place.
5) BUDGET OUTLINES
Market rates for printing, install, artwork transport, insurance, technician day rates — AI tools don’t have accurate numbers for the Croatian market. But they do know what a well-structured budget LOOKS LIKE: which categories are mandatory, which rows need line-item detail, which costs are eligible under one call and not another. I get the structure in five minutes, especially if I’ve already fed it our templates. I still type in the numbers myself, and check them — but it saves me a great deal of time in putting the tables together.
6) MOCKUPS FOR POSTERS AND INSTALL LAYOUTS
Image-generation tools (Firefly, Midjourney, and the like) are useful for early sketches of a poster, or for picturing “what would this wall look like with three works on it?” Just so we’re clear: these are sketches, mock-ups — visuals that never go to print, but are there to help you make a few decisions and picture the final result more easily.
None of these tools sponsored this piece. I use Claude because its responses are the easiest to edit, and because it doesn’t “hallucinate.” ChatGPT and Gemini perform similarly for most of these tasks; the choice is more about habit than quality (though there are different camps on that too). The free plans on Claude and ChatGPT will cover occasional work; for steady use, a subscription is worth considering. ClickUp Brain comes inside a paid ClickUp plan.
What stays yours
Back to the question from the beginning: what do you WANT to be doing?
Everything you put in the WANT column — the research, the writing, the curatorial work, the conversation with the artist about why this, and why now — that’s what AI will never do for you (at least not properly). Not because it’s technically impossible, but because YOU are the one who does it best. The moment you hand it off to AI, the work stops being yours.
The rest — admin, coordination, shaping the same sentences in five different places — let that go. A properly briefed tool won’t betray you there. On the contrary: it’ll give you back a few hours a week that you can put toward the artistic work that’s been waiting for six months. Or that workshop you promised yourself, at the end of 2025, you’d finally put together.
For the things in between — coordinating with the press, building a strong, strategic communications plan, setting prices, planning the season, negotiating with curators and buyers — human work remains essential. That’s what we do at DLightful Services, through consultation for galleries and museums and artist coaching and mentoring. (And for collectors who want the same kind of thinking before their next acquisition — and before presenting their collection — there’s also art advisory for private collectors.)
AI is here — and it’s here to stay. The question is no longer whether we’ll use it, but whether we’ll let it think for us, and start doing, in our place, the very things we actually enjoy.
Notes
[1] “What Do You Need in 2026?” survey, DLightful Services, December 2025 – January 2026. Responses from visual artists, galleries, and collectors, primarily from Croatia, the wider region, and several EU countries.
[2] Dora Derado Giljanović, “Somewhere along the way, the job description for working in a cultural institution quietly expanded…”, LinkedIn post, June 2026, https://www.linkedin.com/in/doraderado.
[3] Dora Derado Giljanović, “Može li AI pisati o tvojoj umjetnosti?” / “Can AI write about your art?”, Instagram carousel, @dlightful.services, 24 February 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DVIsYhnCoOM/.
[4] Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, and Pattie Maes, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” preprint, 10 June 2025, arXiv:2506.08872, https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872.
[5] “The Professional Press Release Structure That Journalists Actually Use,” DLightful Services Substack, https://open.substack.com/pub/dlightful/p/the-professional-press-release-structure.