What's the weirdest thing a gallery ever said to you in the rejection email?
Ok mine is genuinely still haunting me. I sent a polite little portfolio email to a gallery I really wanted, spent like two days picking the 8 images (you know how it is, second-guessing every single one) and the reply was one sentence: "Your work is lovely but we are at capacity for watery landscapes."
Watery. Landscapes. I paint the interior of my apartment. There is no water in it. There is a WINDOW. That's it. And also what does capacity even mean, is it a shelf thing?? Are you out of shelf??
Anyway I'm not even mad, I framed it, it lives in my studio now. But I want to know I'm not alone in the weird rejection pile. What's the strangest, funniest, or most confusing thing a gallery has actually said to you? Not even rejections, could be a comment at an opening, a note in the guestbook, whatever. Tell me yours, I need to know mine isn't the wildest one out there 😭
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the window doing that much work that it became the whole genre is honestly kind of a compliment, even if they didn't mean it that way. "capacity" is the tell, they had a template open and just needed a slot to drop your name into.
mine wasn't a rejection, it was a maybe. "we'd love to see more, but perhaps fewer of the sad ones." fewer sad ones. i asked which ones read as sad and never got an answer, which i think about more than i should.