I remember a particular Tuesday in my old gallery, standing in front of a stunning, large-scale oil on linen from 2014, watching a serious collector squint at a canvas that should have been breathtaking. The problem wasn’t the brushwork or the composition; it was a cheap, warm-toned halogen bulb positioned just far enough away to […]
I remember a Tuesday in late November, twenty years ago, standing in my gallery with a bruised thumb, a level that wouldn’t stay straight, and a mounting sense of dread as I stared at a blank white wall. Most people think the magic happens when the artist finishes the canvas, but the real, unglamorous truth […]
I remember standing in the back of my gallery in 1998, staring at a collection of landscape oils that were technically proficient but utterly soul-crushing, while a local developer asked me if I knew “how to curate a small exhibition” that wouldn’t make his wife bored. He didn’t want art; he wanted atmosphere. Most people […]
I remember standing in the back of a sleek, white-walled institution in London, listening to a curator drone on about “interrogating the liminality of space” while I looked at the actual work. It was a beautiful, expensive way of saying absolutely nothing. People treat the process of how curators build exhibitions like it’s some sacred, […]
Everyone tells you that museum acquisition is this grand, mystical alchemy where a curator discovers a soul and a committee grants immortality. It’s a lovely fairy tale, but it’s absolute nonsense. In my twenty-six years in the trade, I learned that understanding how museum acquisition works has far less to do with divine inspiration and […]
I remember sitting in a drafty corner of a municipal museum in the late nineties, watching a young painter stare at a blank wall with a look of pure, unadulterated heartbreak. She had just been told her work was “too commercial” for a public collection, which is a polite, institutional way of saying they had […]
I remember sitting in my gallery back in 2004, nursing a lukewarm Earl Grey and watching a young painter walk in with a contract that looked more like a mortgage than a partnership. He was beaming, convinced he’d finally “made it” because a prestigious-sounding entity wanted to represent him, completely oblivious to the fact that […]
I remember sitting in my gallery back in the late nineties, watching a young painter look absolutely shell-shocked after being told by a “consultant” that he needed to pay a five-thousand-pound exhibition fee just to get his work on the walls. He thought he was buying prestige, but he was actually just paying for someone […]
I remember sitting in my back office back in 2014, nursing a lukewarm gin and tonic while an artist I’d championed for a decade sat across from me, vibrating with a mixture of guilt and fury. She wanted out, but she was terrified that walking away would turn her into a pariah—or worse, that she’d […]
I remember sitting in my back office in 2004, staring at a ledger and realizing that a young painter in my stable had just sold a piece for three thousand pounds, yet she was still struggling to pay her studio rent. She looked at me with such wide-eyed, naive trust, never once questioning the mechanics […]