Confessions of a Gallery Guard: An Introduction
I spent two years working at a small contemporary art museum in New York, and it was completely bananas.
How the hell did I get here?
I found myself at this museum after spending several months at the most soul-crushing job I’d ever had (Staples, you’re terrible and you owe all of your past and present employees monetary compensation for emotional damages.) and, Jesus, talk about culture shock. Going from a retail environment where the customer is always right to being not only encouraged but expected to tell visitors “no” is a little jarring. At the very least, it’s a crash course in getting over social anxiety real quick.
I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but what I certainly didn’t expect was the truly absurd and, frankly, batshit things that go on at a museum. Working with the public in this context is wild. For two years, 80% of my job was just people-watching. You learn a lot about people when you watch them all day, and people are weird! Sometimes it’s delightful, sometimes it’s rage-inducing, and sometimes it’s just downright confusing. We all worked the desk as well as watching the galleries, and we rotated to give each other breaks and such, but for the most part, the job consisted of being this…
