Subject: Off the record
Date: Friday, Aug 1, 2008 01:01
From: gallerygirl@artreview.com
To: office@artreview.com
Conversation: Off the record

Roll-over London, New York and Sudeley (wherever that is) – the summer no longer belongs to you, you've been totally usurped by Russia, with the latest and noisiest event in the artworld calendar – Roman Abramovich's girlfriend's party.

When I left university, I burst forth into the world with true faith in visual culture. Not a dollar of my parents' money ill spent, I couldn't wait to make my mark. Of course, I didn't quite know how, but felt sure that with chance and fate as my guides, an inevitable destiny of greatness awaited. Even so, it was something of a surprise to find that my moment would come about as a result of securing a party invitation to the most exclusive event of the millennium to date. The invitation wasn't for me, I might add, but for a coked-up, overcontrolling gallery director.

As I type, hoards of oligarchs surrounded by money-hungry Westerners intent on flogging their art wares, as well as a few 'curators' and artists thrown in for intellectual good measure, will be queuing up outside a disused, grotty old bus depot in some godforsaken end of Moscow that doesn't know what's hit it. Troops of burly security men will be hustling in the crème de la crème of the artworld (and P.) – from Gogo (no, despite his penchant for blondes, we're not friends, but I've learned that everyone in the artworld uses first names or nicknames so that it can appear that they might be) to the newly fired directors of whichever art fair has just closed, or the newly hired ones from those that have just opened – all to sample the intoxicating delights of Amy Winehouse and a $3-million installation work from the current artworld darling.

I won't go into what I had to do to secure said invite. I couldn't bear to recount the details: I know that none of you would want to see me sacked. Ultimately, though, the experience has been a catalyst for me, prompting a modest survey of my surrounding female role models, one of which, I hope, will guide me down my chosen career path.

P. is undeniably a well known and successful gallery director (while obviously not Abramovich-party-level successful, she has 'worked' for her connections, not just slept with them). She worked in several major London galleries before moving to set up a cutting-edge young and funky East End gallery with our other partner. She manages very well in a world that is dominated by men, but I couldn’t cope with the incessant networking or all the self-promotion: the constant repetition of, "He's a really amazing artist, I'm like his best friend, he loves me", which seems to be her only route to securing both sales with big collectors and museum shows for gallery artists.

I then thought of the editorial team here at AR, who have been so welcoming and enthusiastic, and where, for once, the men don't so hugely outnumber the women (no, this is not a suck up; only two of them actually know who I am). Much as I greatly enjoy what good, direct and accessible criticism can bring, I don't really feel much of an urge to enforce my personal questioning of an artwork on an unsuspecting public. Conversely, there's always PR – though the grand dames of the business do look rather freaky – hair extensions and facelifts and boobjobs in their fifties and all sorts. So maybe not.

There's always 'curating' (uttered in a suitably reverential tone). All women curators I've met seem to fall into one of two categories: either extremely knowledgeable, with very fixed ideas, who really can make someone the next big thing, yet tough as nails, terrifying, condescending and quite frankly rude and incapable of holding a conversation with the majority of other women. Or, far worse: young, underqualified and often self-titled 'curators' (here pronounced 'curator?', with an upward lilt at the end), girls who ponce about a year after graduating from whichever big-name art school or university they've been to, in a job secured by their father's credentials and their friendship with the boss's younger sister, ordering everyone around like mad as they 'carefully consider' how a particularly bad series of paintings are hung and lit while trying to avoid anyone referring to them as 'artist's manager'. You'll know you've found one if halfway through a conversation you suddenly feel as if you're holding up a seashell to your ear.

A job in the final resting place for any artwork – the museum sector – would go down well with my relations. Though I recently had to sit through a painful artist's dinner that revealed that the museum world is intolerably cruel to women who drop off the ladder. J. switched seats with me in a sweaty panic to avoid being opposite a big former museum director who was very unceremoniously thrown from her post. She now waddles round criticising anyone and everyone for not paying her to breathe, whingeing and whining from private views to gate-crashed gallery dinners, waving her former credentials and bemoaning the fact that 'her babies' (she used to teach) have cruelly forgotten how she helped them get their first foot on the ladder.

But I'm a long way off that. When I proudly presented my grandmother with my first ever printed words a few weeks ago, she exclaimed, "What is this darling?", and then stared at me rather hard. "You're not that… Belle de Jour…?"

GG

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