Strategic communications

So the artist, looking like one of those intelligently fetching female characters in an early Truffaut film, met with my friend in the art database world the other day. He was very helpful and companionable, as indeed he often is, and they discussed at some length the artist's various strategies, certainly to a degree later considered both helpful and kind by the artist. As I think I have alluded to already, the artist then met the gallerist in person, though for one reason or another, or maybe none, he was too busy to meet at first, but they did sit down together in the end, about an hour later, across from one another like characters in an oil painting, card players perhaps, discussing the precise merits of the artist's work and its subject matter. The email, which the artist was then asked to follow up with, took place the following Monday, in fact three days ago, but she has heard nothing back yet. (Silence can be painful for the artist, even the artist's husband, as it reeks also of a kind of bad manners.) Anyway, people who work in galleries are often telling you how busy they are - unlike aid workers, or frontline soldiers, or secretaries for absentee bosses, who really are - though from my experience this so-called 'busi-ness' invariably incorporates simply moving from the phone to the newspaper and back again, in between a cigarette perhaps, though less and less, a sip of wine, or a strong coffee, oh and the odd stroll around the gallery if someone with what looks like a fat enough wallet walks in. I hate to say it but there is nothing, or at least very little, sacred about the capital's private art galleries, certainly as far as I can see, which admittedly may not be very far. I have seen more manners in a small seaside store selling crayon drawings than I have in any artistic venue in the capitals of the world. (Talking of which, not even Vincent Van Gogh could sell in a major sale last night, I also noticed, which must be saying something not only about our economy but about the fickleness of fashion, also.) Anyway, the gallerist in question, a man I must respect, has told the artist he will think about it, so I suppose the best thing to do is to let him think about it, and without any further disturbance. I wonder, though: where he will do this thinking? I suppose it will have to be in his head as he has none of the artist's work, not even reproductions, though the offer did reappear in the artist's email on Monday that she is willing to bring the work round to the gallery, if in fact he is insufficiently motivated to come and see the work for himself. No, where, I wonder, will he think about it? Will he stare out at the masses pouring through the capital and think about the artist's claim that there is little of the big world pouring through today's great art? Or will it come to him while staring at the glint in a child's eye as they stare up at their father, say, while feeling momentarily fearful of the world? Or, like much else in the world, will it rely totally on self-interest? As sure as this sentence will end, the artist will get a show somewhere.