I swapped the bio for a gallery CV and lost a follower over it
so this is small but it nags at me.
for two years my instagram bio listed the materials. acrylic washes, charcoal, torn paper, found photographs. it read like a recipe. people scrolled past it. fine.
last month a small space in the city put me in a group show, the kind where the wall label gets more attention than the work. the curator asked me to send the "proper" line, the one that goes on the checklist. so i copied it into the bio. the full formal thing, medium and dimensions and the year.
two days later a follower was gone. no comment, no DM, just gone. probably the "torn paper" phrasing being replaced by something with a semicolon in it.
the strange part is the enquiries actually went up. three of them. all the same flavor, asking if the piece was for sale and where. so the dry formal line is doing the work the soft bio refused to do.
i keep thinking i traded a description for a job listing and i don't know if that's a loss. the label says what it is. it doesn't say what it is. and the person who left never bought anything anyway.
still. i miss the old line a little.
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Honestly the recipe version was doing more work than you think. "Acrylic washes, charcoal, torn paper, found photographs" tells a person how the thing was made, and that is what pulls someone in. The checklist line tells them how to file it. Different job entirely.
I do this with mosaic, and the wall-label line is always the flattest sentence about a piece I have ever had to write. Medium, dimensions, year. Nobody ever got curious about a stone because it was 40 x 60 cm. One follower is not a verdict anyway, people drop off for all kinds of reasons, a haircut, a bad week. But if the formal line feels dead to you when you read it back, that is worth listening to. You can keep the show credit and still write the human sentence.
Half agree. The recipe line tells you how it was made, yes, but "how" is not the same as "why" and I think we overrate process as the hook. What makes someone stop is usually a question they cannot answer yet. Dimensions and medium do the opposite, they close it. The wall label is designed to kill curiosity, that is its function, it makes the object legible for insurance and shipping.
But I would push back on the framing that the checklist line is just flatter. In printmaking the multiple has a specification, the edition number, the state, the plate. That data is not decoration, it is the whole conceptual point. So maybe the problem is not formality, is that we have no good short form between the recipe and the invoice. I have never found one either.
ok the printmaking point actually lands. edition number, state, plate. that's not a label, that's part of the object, you can't separate it. so sure, data can be content.
but that's the thing, my checklist line wasnt that. it said acrylic and torn paper and a size. it described the shipping crate, not the print. i think the difference is whether the number tells you something about the making or just about the handling.
"the wall label is designed to kill curiosity" i'm stealing that
the 40 x 60 cm thing got me. nobody has ever gotten curious about a measurement, in any medium.
though i'll push back a little on the "how" being the hook. i think the recipe line worked because it's a list of things you can touch. torn paper, found photos. it's not process so much as materials that already have a history. someone reads "found photographs" and their brain does something. nobody's brain does anything with "archival pigment print."
the mosaic version of that is probably just naming the stones. not how you set them.