What did the gallery do after the yes that told you it was a mistake?
Getting in is the story everyone tells. I want the other one.
Mine: a small space took three pieces from me years back. Contract was a handshake. Then they wanted me to frame the mosaics in these awful gold frames, because "buyers need to see it's art." Mosaics. Gold frames. I said no, they hung them anyway propped against the wall like leftover tiles, and sold one. To this day I don't know if I'm angrier about the frames or the wall.
So what's your version? The thing that happened after the yes that made you think, ah, this was not the right door. Or tell me I'm wrong and the gold frames were fine 🙏
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Honestly the propped-against-the-wall thing is worse than the frames for me. Frames you can argue about, that's a taste disagreement. Propping someone's work on the floor is a whole sentence about where you sit in their head. And then selling it like that just proves they were right that nobody would notice. Ugh.
Mine was milder but the same flavor. A space took two paintings, said all the right things at the yes, then when I asked when they'd go up I got "we're still deciding the wall." Three weeks. I finally went in and found them in the back room leaning on a radiator. In August. They didn't see the problem, which is the part that stuck with me, more than the heat damage.
The handshake contract is the bit I keep coming back to in your story though. Did the no on the frames actually mean anything to them, or was it a thing you said that they just... filed away as a mood?
A radiator. In August. That is the detail that will keep me up tonight, not the frames. A mosaic at least survives being leaned on a wall, it has weight and it sits there like a stone. Paintings on a radiator, in that heat, I don't even want to think about what that does to a canvas over three weeks.
And you are right about the sentence. "We're still deciding the wall" is the polite version of "we took you to fill a slot in our calendar and now we're busy." Three weeks of deciding and nobody thought to move them off a heat source. That tells you everything about who was actually looking at the work.
Funny thing, the sale is the part that stings least for me now. They sold it because someone walked in and saw it, which is more than the wall ever did. It's the "buyers need to see it's art" line I still chew on. As if the material needs a costume to be taken seriously.