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 spent twenty-six years watching artists walk into my gallery with canvases that were nothing more than expensive, glorified photocopies. They’d spent hundreds of hours obsessing over every pixel, thinking they were mastering the craft, when in reality they were just producing dead translations of a digital file. There is a pervasive, misguided notion in […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded studio in the late nineties, watching a young artist try to explain his “limited edition” series to a very confused, very wealthy local collector. He was using all the right academic jargon, but the moment he stumbled over the technical distinction between a lithograph and a […]
I remember sitting in my gallery back in 2012, watching a young artist try to explain a three-minute loop to a collector who just wanted to know if he could hang it above his sideboard. The collector looked baffled, the artist looked defensive, and I sat there realizing that the traditional rules of “objecthood” were […]
Stop treating an auction catalogue like it’s a holy text. I spent twenty-six years watching collectors—and far too many artists—stare at a hammer price as if it were an objective truth, when in reality, it’s often just a snapshot of a very specific, very loud moment in a room full of people trying to outbid […]
I remember sitting in the back of a cluttered studio in the late nineties, watching a young painter struggle with a bowl of fruit that looked more like a collection of colorful lumps than actual light and shadow. He had spent a fortune on the finest sable brushes and expensive pigments, yet he was still […]
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, […]
Most people think a “complete guide to sculpture” should be a lecture on the chemical composition of bronze or the historical lineage of the Renaissance masters, but frankly, that’s a waste of your time. I spent twenty-six years watching brilliant makers pour their souls into stone and metal, only to realize they had no idea […]
I remember sitting in the back of a drafty studio in 1998, watching a young man spend three thousand pounds on a high-definition video setup for a piece that lasted exactly twelve minutes. He thought the expensive lens would somehow capture the “soul” of the movement, but all he actually captured was a very pricey, […]
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 […]