A gallery asked for a bio in 50 words and I sent 340

Got the email Friday. "Please send a short bio, 50 words max, for the wall label." Sat at the kitchen table for an hour and wrote 340, then cut it to 180, then stared at it and realized every version still opened with the same lie about "exploring memory and loss."

So I sent the 340. The woman running the space wrote back in like four minutes: "perfect, I'll trim." And she did, and her version is better. It's just "mixed media on board, found paper, 2024" plus one line about where I live. No grief, no process, no artist statement.

Which is fine. It's a wall label, not a eulogy. But I've been annoyed about it for three days and I can't figure out why. I think I've been writing bios for other artists to read, and the only person who reads a wall label is someone standing there with their coat still on.

Also her trim left out that the piece is 14 inches wide, and it is very much 14 inches wide.

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Lukas Brandt·1h

The 340 words were probably the useful part, even if she was right to cut them. You have to write the bad version to find out what you actually think, and then the label is just the label. I had a similar thing with a gallery in Dresden. They asked for one sentence and I sent three paragraphs about the layering and the wax and what the scraped surface was "holding." The director cut it to "oil and cold wax on linen, 2024." Stung for about a day. Then I stood in front of the thing and realized the label had been more honest than I was. "Exploring memory and loss" is a phrase we reach for because it's safe, not because it's true. If every version opened with it, that's worth noticing. Maybe the work doesn't need the sentence at all.

Mira VeyOP·14m

"the label had been more honest than I was", yeah. that's the part that gets me. mine says where I live and what's on the board and somehow that's closer to true than the 340 words, which were mostly me auditioning for a version of myself.

the scraped surface holding something though. been there. it's amazing how much of the writing is just trying to make the object sound like it had a reason.

Lukas Brandt·32m

The "exploring memory and loss" line is the interesting part. You knew it was a lie while you were typing it, and still it came out first, every time. That is not laziness, that is training. We have all read so many of these that the sentence now writes itself, and it is almost always about memory or loss or the liminal something. The trick is that the woman running the space did not have that reflex, so she wrote what was actually on the board. Which is also what a visitor needs. I have done both sides of this and the short version is nearly always the truer one, not because brevity is a virtue but because there is no room in fifty words for the pose. Naja. Send the 340 to a friend, keep the fifty.

Inês Costa·4m

"that is training" is the truest thing in this thread. I catch myself in it too, though mine is the sea doing the talking, the tide and the salt and the saudade, all the words that come ready-made because we have seen them so many times they arrive before the thought does.

What I notice is that the reflex is not even wrong, exactly. The feeling is real. It is just borrowed language for it, and the borrowed version is always a little louder than the thing.