
I was visiting an exhibition last week when I came across a painting I had handled, several years back. I knew it well from my time working in the art world, so it was a bit like bumping into an old friend; you know the one — intense and brilliant and tiring. You see them sparingly, and when you do so it’s usually with the feeling that it’s come far too soon.
As an art lover, being desensitised to a painting that once held you in its thrall can feel like a minor bereavement. But after years spent looking after works like this one, in airport lounges and cold warehouse storerooms, this detachment often becomes second nature; you develop a necessary blindness to the qualities of the work, and at the same time a hypervigilance for the cosmetic and technical detail others might not see.
This skewed perspective forever alters your gallery-going experience. Forget the brushwork — is the wall spotless? Is the label perfectly straight? Is the centre of the artwork 155cm from the floor? Are the correct fixings being used? I couldn’t help myself. As the well-dressed crowd thinned off, and with one eye on the guard, I pressed my cheek to the wall and peeked around the back of the frame of the painting; spring lock fixings — perfect.
Over the past two decades, I have worked in a variety of jobs which brought me into contact with very valuable works of art. With budgets cut to the bone and deadlines moving by the hour, the establishment art world is — behind the façade — surprisingly low on glamour. Job titles are fluid and often bear no resemblance to the duties performed; one minute you might be touching up a million-pound picture, the next scraping half-eaten canapes off the gallery floor.
Of all the people I worked with, the ones who carry the heaviest load, literally and figuratively, are not the polished curators or gallery assistants, but the art handlers. Far from the press images of men in cotton gloves and Persiled shirts, the day-to-day world of art handling is one of bulging necks, Status Quo ponytails, Rustlers Burgers for breakfast; gallons of sweat and total aesthetic desensitisation.
Art handlers deal with everything: cars, swords, books, clocks, Picassos, ancient fossils, the blouse Marc Bolan wore on Top of the Pops, the horrendous sculpture that just got craned onto the mud outside your local town hall. And working at ground level, they have a pretty decent insight into the art world’s shortcomings, not to mention a wealth of trivia about the items they handle.
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