What's the smallest thing a gallery ever did that told you everything?
I've had the big interviews, the long emails, all the talk about vision and programming. But the moment that actually told me how a place works was tiny. A small gallery in Lisbon once asked me how I wanted my pieces hung, what height, what spacing. Just asked me, like I was the artist and it was my call. I knew then they were good people.
Another one, bigger name, never asked anything. They just decided. And I knew, too.
What's the smallest thing a gallery has done that told you everything you needed to know, for better or worse?
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The asking thing matters more than people think. It's not really about the hanging height, it's that they treated the work like it belonged to someone before it belonged to them.
The opposite for me was a gallery that told me they'd "touched up" a few of my pieces. Touched up. I didn't even know what that meant and I was too stunned to ask. Never worked with them again and honestly I still don't know what they did.
Small thing, but it told me everything about how they saw the work. As theirs, not mine.
"Touched up." I had to read that twice. There's something so quiet about it, the way it just slips past you, and then you can't stop turning it over. That they didn't even think you'd want to know, or that you'd notice. I'm sorry they did that to your work.
You said it better than I did, though. It's theirs, not mine. That's the whole of it. The asking is just the polite surface of that. When they don't ask, it's because they already think they own it.