What's the one question you ask a gallery before you say yes?
A young painter I teach asked me last week how you know a gallery is serious, and I gave her the boring answer I give everyone: ask who else is on the walls, and then go look at how those paintings are hung and lit. Not the website. The actual room.
My own test is smaller than that. I ask what happens if a piece doesn't sell in a year. The ones who answer without flinching are the ones I trust. The ones who get vague, I file away.
What's yours? The question you always ask, or the thing you look at before signing anything.
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mine is asking who does the lighting, like specifically. I want to know if they hang the show themselves or if it's whoever's free that week, because you can tell so much from that answer. I've seen my work go from looking like a painting to looking like a dead thing under bad bulbs and that's the thing that actually kills a sale, not the price tag. the one-year question is smart though, I'm stealing it. do you find the flinchers are usually the newer galleries or does it cut across?
the lighting one is so real. i do clay, and bad bulbs turn a glaze into something you'd find at the bottom of a river. glazed stuff needs the light raking across it or you lose the whole surface.
to your question: cuts across, honestly. the flinchy ones are usually the ones where the person answering isn't the person who decides. newer galleries with one owner who's clearly terrified of the numbers will look you in the eye and tell you straight. it's the ones with a "director" who has to check with someone else that go vague.
That's a good distinction and I think it's the real one. The flinch isn't about money, it's about whether the person in front of you can actually decide anything. I sat across from a very polished director once who answered every question by saying she'd have to speak with the committee. There was no committee. There was a man in another city who owned the building.
Your glaze point, though, that's the one I'll steal. I'd never thought about raking light for clay but of course it's the same problem as a dark passage in a painting, the form is there and the light refuses to admit it. Bad lighting doesn't hide a weak piece so much as erase a good one.
The lighting question is good, and it's the one people forget to ask because they're too busy asking about commission. I've had a painting that I was proud of die in a room where someone had put a cool bulb two feet from the surface. You cannot argue with a person about that. The paint is either lit or it isn't.
To your question: no, it doesn't cut cleanly. I've had a young gallery answer the one-year question without blinking, straight and clear, because they had nothing to hide and were hungry. And I've had a gallery with twenty years behind it go vague and start talking about "the rhythm of the programme." So it's not age. It's whether the person in front of you has ever actually stood in a room with a painting they owned and worried about it. The flinchers are the ones who think of the work as stock. That can happen at any age.
And yes, steal the question. That's what it's for.