You made rookie mistakes, please don't write your experience up as panacea. Most people who are interested in art will not "like" the facebook art page. They might not even like any pages at all. Connection targeting is spotty unless you know your demographic actively "likes" relevant pages, like Twilight or Justin Bieber. Finally, perhaps your ad just is not that interesting. That is more likely than not, given that people come up with really good ads. Far be it for me to defend a rival's product, but you don't build the revenue facebook has if your product is useless.

It's great that you're sharing your experience, but your lack of experience and sensationalisitic headline strike me as cynically timed linkbait.

Facebook lets you bid based on CPC or CPM. Sounds like he was using CPM when he should have used CPC. Either that or his CPC bid was really high.