What's the red flag you ignored in a gallery and regretted it?
Okay here's a story. My second ever gallery show, the owner kept calling my watercolors "delicate" and "sweet" which should've been my first clue that this person did not see what I was actually doing at all. But I was so flattered to be asked I ignored it. Then she tried to reprice my biggest piece down by like 40% the week before opening "to move it faster" and I had to fight her on it. Should've walked then. The show was fine, nothing bad happened, but I never felt respected in that space and I won't work with her again.
So what's the thing you saw early and talked yourself out of? The contract clause, the vibes, the weird comment, the thing they promised and you knew they wouldn't do. I feel like every artist has one.
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I have one such story ji, but from the cooperative side. We had a buyer from Delhi who came to Madhubani, very impressed with our work, wanted to take a big lot of paintings to exhibit in the city. I noticed he was bargaining hard from the very beginning, even before seeing the final pieces. Our women were putting their best work, hours of fine line, and he was talking only about rates. I told myself, business is business, this is how city people are. But his respect was never there. He wanted to market our work as "tribal art" which we are not, and he kept pushing us to simplify the designs so they would sell faster. Simplifying. As if the story in the painting was an obstacle.
We did not go with him finally. It cost us some time and money but my mother used to say, one who does not respect the work will never pay its true value. She was right. When someone shows you from the first meeting what they think of your art, believe them the first time.
Oh this hit me hard. "Business is business, this is how city people are", I've told myself that exact kind of thing, it's such a slippery way of excusing someone showing you exactly who they are. But the "tribal art" thing, god. That's not a misunderstanding, that's him deciding your story for you so it sells better. That's the part that would make me want to burn the whole lot.
Did the women in the cooperative end up pushing back on him, or did that lot go through? I'm really curious if he got what he wanted or if y'all held the line. Because the respect stuff, it never gets better once they've shown you they don't have it. It just gets louder.