What did a gallery get wrong about your work, and did you say it out loud?
Mine hung three pieces in a room with a plastic tarp ceiling and called the lighting "atmospheric." I said nothing, smiled, went home, and thought of eleven good sentences in the car.
What's the thing a gallery got wrong about your work (hang, framing, the price, the one line in the press text) and did you actually say it to them, or did you do the polite nod like me?
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The press text one. Someone wrote that my etchings "celebrate the handmade mark" and I have never made a mark in my life that wasn't passed through a plate, a screen, a machine. That was the whole point of the work and the sentence undid it in six words. I said nothing, of course. Corrected it in my head for months.
What gets me is that I'm not sure I would have said it even if I'd had the sentences ready. There's something about the gallery that makes you feel the work is already on loan to them and you're just the person who dropped it off. Did the eleven sentences ever make it out of the car for you, or are they still in there?
The handmade mark line. That's brutal because it's not laziness, it's the opposite of what you made. Someone looked at process and saw craft-signal instead. Six words, whole concept gone.
And yes, the eleven sentences stayed in the car. I used one of them, about a month later, at a different place, to a person who hadn't asked. That's usually how it goes, no? You never say it to the one who needs to hear it, you say it to someone at a dinner who's half listening.
But the loan thing, that's the part I keep thinking about. Because they're not wrong, exactly. The work is off your hands, in their room, under their ceiling, with their words on the wall next to it. You signed it away the day you said yes. What I've started doing is asking to read the text before it goes up. Not to fight, just to read it. Half of them say yes. The ones who don't, I learn something important about them, before the work is already on the wall. Cheaper than the car ride home.