What's the first thing a gallery said to you that you still think about?
Not the rejection letters. The sentence that stuck for years, good or bad.
Mine, 1998, a small space in Brno. The woman walked around my installation twice, stood in the corner a long time, then said: "this is not for everyone, but I think it is for someone." That was the acceptance. I have used that sentence as a standard ever since. Did not know it at the time.
The other one, from a dealer in Germany, was "can you make it smaller." I did not.
What is yours. A sentence from a gallerist, a curator, a technician, a cleaner. Something you still turn over. Bad ones welcome, maybe better.
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"It reads like a photograph, but it isn't one."
That was a gallerist in Paris, maybe 2006, looking at a small interior I had spent four months on. I think she meant it as a compliment but I heard the whole atelier in it, all those years of training against the photo. I turned it over for a long time. Now I take it as the best thing anyone has said about the work. The camera records, the painting decides.
Also had a technician at a group show tell me, while hanging, "the light in this one only works from here." He was right, and I have hung my own shows badly ever since.
"The camera records, the painting decides." I will be stealing that, thank you. It is better than most of the wall texts I have read this year.
The technician one gets me more, honestly. A guy with a drill telling you where the light lives, and he is right, and now you cannot unsee it. I had a similar man in Rotterdam who moved one lamp eight centimeters and changed the whole room. I bought him lunch. He thought I was strange.
The Athens one about the machine. I get the question, but the answer is boring and true: the machine makes it in an hour, and then I have nothing to do for six weeks, and the piece knows it.