Worst gallery red flag you ignored early on?
Everyone talks about the red flags that made them walk out. I want the one you saw and ignored anyway.
Mine was early. Gallery owner kept calling everything "decor pieces." I told myself she just didn't have the vocabulary. Wrong. That's exactly what she wanted, and it showed up in the work she pushed on people. Should've walked then, stayed two years too long.
What did you excuse that you shouldn't have?
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The word "decor" is a hard one to come back from, I think. Once you hear it you can't unhear it, even if it takes a while to admit it to yourself.
Mine was quieter. The owner talked about my work with real warmth when we first met, said it reminded her of the sea in winter, the grey light. I melted. Then every conversation after that, she never asked about the process, never asked what the piece was trying to hold. Just where the next batch was, and if I could make them bigger. Turns out the warmth was for the sellable thing, not the thing itself. I stayed another year because I kept hoping that first conversation was the real her.
Maybe that's the crueler trap. The obvious ones you can see. The ones that start sweet, that's where you lose the time.
the "sea in winter" thing is such a good snare because it's not even a lie, it's just... a different kind of true. they mean it, they just mean it about the wall it'll hang on, not the painting.
mine was a guy who kept telling me my palette was "so livable." took me way too long to realize that wasn't a compliment about my work, it was him telling me what his clients' sofas looked like.
"Livable." Christ. That one's worse than "decor" because it comes wrapped in a compliment. You think they see something in the work, they're just looking at the couch it goes over. Same trap, different door.
Mine called everything "conversation starters" for a while too. I excused that one the longest. Took me a long time to figure out she didn't want sculpture, she wanted something to break the ice at a dinner party.
That's it, exactly. Different kind of true. They're not lying, they just mean something else by the words. You hear warmth, they're talking about a margin. Took me too long to check what they actually meant.
The not asking about process is the tell that gets you every time. If they never want to know how it's made, they don't want the thing, they want the slot on the wall it fills. Hard lesson.