Confessions of a Gallery Guard: The Art of People Watching
When you watch people all day for a living, you start picking up on the correlation between personality and body language.
It Could Have Turned Into A Drinking Game
My museum has a very annoying door.
The museum I worked at has two sets of heavy glass doors bracketing the entrance vestibule, and one of the doors on the inside set would slam really loudly when it swung closed. You don’t want loud noises in a gallery, the place echoes enough as it is.
To remedy this, we would keep it locked, and a little arrow was added to it, pointing to the door pull that you should use. Problem is, the door that slams really loud is the right-hand door, which means almost every single visitor went for that door first. Like, to the point where we started joking about carving tallies into the wall behind the desk.
To the visitors’ credit, the arrow was about three inches long, maybe an inch high, and white. On a glass door. I totally get wanting to stick to an aesthetic but sometimes you gotta make an exception. I did it too when I went there for my interview.
