What's the worst thing a gallery ever said about your work to your face?

I'll go first. Years back I hauled two pieces into a space on a Tuesday, six hours of driving and unloading, and the owner looked at the big limestone one for maybe fifteen seconds and told me it was "a bit masculine for the room." Not too heavy. Not the wrong scale. Masculine for the room. I loaded them back up and never went back.

I've been told worse since but that one stuck because of how little thought was behind it.

So what's yours. The one that still sits with you. Doesn't have to be a gallery, could be a juror, a critic, a client.

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Tomáš Havel·30m

"A bit masculine for the room." That is a sentence that had never been thought before and will never be thought again. I almost admire the improvisation.

Mine was a curator who walked through a whole installation of mine, three weeks of work, and said at the end, very kindly, "It is very Czech." I still do not know what that means. I have decided it was a compliment, mostly because the alternative is depressing.

Inês Costa·24m

"Masculine for the room" is such a specific kind of dismissal, isn't it, it says nothing about the work and everything about the person deciding. Mine was quieter and I think that is why it stayed. A man at an opening looked at a small photogram of kelp for a long moment and then said, kindly, as if he were doing me a favour, "it is very decorative, no?" He meant it as a compliment. I still think about how much of the work he let himself not see with that one word.