Paid internships in the art world are genuinely great. Now let's talk about everything they don't solve…

Sotheby's Institute recently launched a fellowship programme where 20 master's students get 12 weeks inside the auction house. They’re paid above minimum wage while earning academic credit at the same time.

The Art Newspaper article calls it "forward-thinking and downright necessary."

And it is, relative to the alternative, which has always been unpaid, informal, and heavily dependent on who your parents know.

A third of internships in the art world come through family connections. That number has been true for years. It's just rarely said out loud by the people who benefited from it.

So yes, formalising this, paying people properly, and creating a structured pathway is progress. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But I do think it's worth being honest about where that progress starts and stops.

The Sotheby's Institute charges significant fees for its master's programmes, so the students entering this fellowship have already cleared the first filter, which is being able to afford, or borrow enough to fund, postgraduate study in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The pipeline to the paid internship runs through an institution that most people from working-class backgrounds will never realistically access.

The article notes that "grade inflation makes it increasingly difficult for students to distinguish themselves."

But there's a bigger one sitting underneath it that doesn't even get mentioned…

The students who can't distinguish themselves often aren't in the room at all.

The cost of getting to that room, the degrees, the unpaid work experience, the networks, the geography, has already filtered them out two or three stages before the internship conversation even begins.

I've spent the past decade working with artists who came up outside of that system entirely.

Some of the most interesting, technically skilled, culturally relevant artists I've worked with have never been near a Sotheby's Institute or a Goldsmiths or a Chelsea.

They learned because they had to.
They built networks because they had no other option.
They made art because they couldn't afford not to.

What they didn't have was a formal route into the rooms where the money and the decisions are.

That's still the problem, and it starts a long time before the internship.