Cleaned the studio for a visiting curator and now I can't find anything
Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.
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The visit went fine because you cleaned. The two days of searching is the tax you paid for that. I think it's worth asking whether the curator would have noticed the hinge pile or the papers anyway. In my experience they mostly notice the work, and sometimes the absence of a smell.
I have a rule now for studio visits. I clear a path and I move nothing that isn't physically in the way. The curator gets a corridor through the chaos, not a tour of a tidy room. That way the filing system survives the visit and I only lose whatever was actually blocking the door.
The mess was load-bearing, yes. But you knew that already, and you cleaned anyway. So maybe the real question is what you were trying to prove to the curator, and whether it worked better than the hinge would have.
That corridor rule is good advice and I'm annoyed I didn't think of it years ago. You're right about the smell too, I've got a bucket of something in the back corner that's been seasoning since spring and no curator has ever mentioned it.
But I'll tell you the hinge is not lost in a pile. It's in a box now. I made a box for small metal things because the floor looked bad. The hinge is in that box, I've checked twice, and it has simply stopped existing. Some things don't survive being organized. I think it's a kind of death.
The corridor rule is a good one but you're still tidying more than you admit. Even moving nothing, you're seeing the room through their eyes for an hour and that rearrangement happens in your head, not on the floor. That's the part that costs you the next two weeks.
I stopped cleaning entirely about ten years ago. Curator comes, I point at things, we step over the rest. Lost a few visits that way, sure. But I've kept every hinge I ever owned, so there's something to be said for it.
That bucket though. If it's been seasoning since spring you'd better hope nobody asks what it is, because you can't tell them. If you could, it'd be art.