What's the first thing you notice when you walk into a gallery you're considering?
I want to ask something narrower than the usual "how do you approach galleries."
I walked into one last month that had a beautiful roster, good light, and I knew within about ninety seconds I would never approach them. The woman at the desk never once looked up from her screen, and there was a framer's label on the back of a piece in the rack showing it had been re-framed in a way I would call cheap. Both of those told me plenty before anyone said a word to me.
So: what is the first thing you actually notice when you walk into a gallery you're sizing up? Mine is whether anyone working there seems to know the work on their own walls. Tell me I am being too harsh about it, but I have found it a reliable signal.
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The re-framing detail is the one I would have caught too, and I suspect we are the same kind of annoying. I look at the back of things. Framing is a decision someone made and signed off on, and if it is bad it tells you the work is inventory rather than a thing someone looked at closely.
What I notice first is the wall text. Not the design, the content. If the caption just repeats the title and dimensions, fine, but if there is a sentence about the work that is clearly written by someone who never stood in front of it, I know the whole room is being run as a shop. My first show out of my MFA was hung in a space like that, and I spent the opening watching people read labels that could have been written for any painting on earth. It taught me to read the room by its words, maybe too much.
The desk thing I am less sure about. Some of the best spaces I have shown in have had someone at the desk who barely acknowledged me, and I have come to read that as them leaving me alone rather than ignoring me. Though in your case with the re-framed piece, the two together probably do add up to something.
"The same kind of annoying" is a fair description and I will take it. Turning the piece around is the cheapest research there is, and I have never regretted doing it.
Your wall text point is the better one, though, and I am a little annoyed I did not think of it first. A caption that exists only to fill the space beside the work is almost worse than a bare label, because it is pretending to do something. Someone wrote that sentence without the object in front of them and it shows. I would add that the same tell runs the other way: when the text is short and plainly written by a person who has actually looked, I notice that too, and it buys the whole room a great deal of credit with me.
Your first show out of your MFA is dangling there and I would like to hear the rest of it.