The Gallery Told You What to Think

There is a particular silence that falls in a room where everyone has already read the wall text. It is not the silence of attention. It is the silence of agreement, arrived at before anyone had the chance to disagree.

I have written that wall text. I know exactly how it is made: late, under pressure, in consultation with a gallerist who has a number in mind. It performs a kind of neutrality it has no right to. And it does its work early, before the eye has settled, before the body has decided anything on its own.

The first review a work receives is written by the people selling it.

What I am arguing for is not the removal of context. Context is generous. What I am arguing against is the sequence: that the interpretation arrives before the encounter, and dresses itself as information.

A friend of mine walks galleries backwards. She reads nothing until she leaves. She says it is the only way she can tell the difference between what she thinks and what she has been told. For a long time I found this affected. I have come around.

The point is not that galleries are lying. Most are not. The point is that a room arranged to sell you something and a room arranged to show you something are, structurally, very hard to tell apart. And the writing on the wall is where the difference should announce itself, and almost never does.