6 lessons about agency I learned working at an art gallery
The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil, Claude Monet, 1880-81
1. It is possible to turn a mediocre job into a great one
I was the only person who applied for the job at the gallery because it was so shitty: it was basically selling coffee all weekends with lousy pay and no vacations during summers. But in 2021 we had recently moved to Denmark, so I had no professional network and didn’t speak the language, and Rebecka had just been born, and we needed the money—so I couldn’t be picky.
I also felt that the place had, as real estate agents say, “good bones”: it was beautiful, they had 6 exhibition halls, and it was a 25-minute bike ride from home.
For most of my career, I have worked short gigs or at projects that I started—the longest stretch I’ve been employed was, I think, 4 months at a bio lab when I was 19. No, that’s not right; I worked 8 months in a school when I was going down a rabbit hole about education in 2016/17. My working model has been that being employed kind of sucks. But this time, since I knew I couldn’t afford to quit anytime soon with the baby and all, I figured I could try treating it like one of my projects. So instead of selling coffee, I looked into how we could streamline the café and the cash register so that the volunteers who help out at the gallery felt comfortable doing my job, then I made myself a small office where I sat down to analyze the business and figure out how to improve it. You can imagine how popular this was. I had to backtrack for a few months after the board told me to get back to the café. And this was a good lesson for someone who is used to being self-employed: at an institution, you can’t just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same page. This, however, doesn’t mean that you should abdicate your judgment and get in line.
I like the approach Sholto Douglas expressed in his interview with Dwarkesh Patel:
If I’m trying to write some code and something isn't working, even if it’s in another part of the code base, I’ll often just go in and fix that thing or at least hack it together to be able to get results. [...] I think that's arguably the most important quality in almost anything. It's just pursuing it to the end of the earth. Whatever you need to do to make it happen, you'll make it happen. [...] I’m just going to vertically solve the entire thing. And that turns out to be remarkably effective.
Ie. you don’t say, “This is my job and that thing is outside my area”—no, if the value you are trying to promote requires you to go outside your role and learn new skills and politick to get the authority to go ahead: then that is your job.
I’m not at the level of Sholto Douglas, but I figured I could at least try. So I made an agreement with my boss, who liked me, that she would let me sit in on the board meetings, and I began mapping out who was who and what they wanted and made sure to talk to all stakeholders when they passed through the gallery, and in 6 months I had a good enough model of what their values and goals were so I could align myself to the mission and make legible to them what I was doing. As my boss learned to trust me, she began to say that my role was “do whatever you think is right,” and eventually, after about a year, “. . . and you work whenever you feel like it.” (It helped that the year I started was the inflection point when the revenue, which had been shrinking or muddling for 5 years, began growing again; this wasn’t all my work, but it made my boss trust me.)
For the last 2.5 years I’ve mostly set my own agenda, and I’ve worked in uneven sprints and bursts, sometimes doing 70-hour weeks (my contract was 20 hours per week), and sometimes staying home for 10 days to write essays. This bursty way of working fits my temperament well, and I’ve genuinely loved this job in a way I didn’t think I’d ever love a job.