I read this as "answer within the hour when preparing an exhibition". If you are in full swing to get an exhibition up and running and this is the time you decide to throw yourself into deep focus work, you are probably hard to work with. I would also assume if some artist told the author "look I know we open on Tuesday, but this Friday we have my kid's birthday so from 4 to 8 I won't be easy to reach", this would probably just be silently dropped from the cou ting of how fast they respond.
On the other hand, without warning going dark for 4 work day hours a few days before exhibition would look terrible if any serious question came up.
So I don't think it's literally responding within the hour, but it comes pretty dang close. You have to keep in mind that being an artist creating art and being an artist setting up an exhibition are basically two different jobs and if you end up doing them in parallel at the same time, that's your problem right there.
I read it like so too. I don’t typically respond to emails immediately unless I have my email application open (which I rarely do as I do enjoy time to do deep work). But in the lead up to a big event there is no way I would go radio silent, unless I’m unconscious in the hospital.
Since when is email expected to be answered immediately??? Anything urgent means a phone call, or a text message. Emails are either for cya reasons (but then my urgency is not necessarily your urgency) or just big stuff needing time - to write, to compose, to think, to analyse. So email answering time is a wrong metric by definition.
How long does setting up an exhibition take, and what kind of hours are you expecting? 4-8 are workday hours?
And what kind of question needs to be answered that fast, but wasn't important enough to be asked several days earlier? My feeling is that there should be very few such questions, few enough that each artist can safely take half a day if they get one.
Setting up an exhibition can take many days, and the hours can be extreme. There is limited time between when the previous show goes down, and when the next show goes up.
It's crunch time for the artist, and what exactly is involved will depend upon the show. This is the time when the artist's concept for the show meets physical reality, and since things involve the physical world, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong.
At this point the artist is essentially a project manager. They are coordinating with other people to fulfill their own vision. If those other people need a question answered before they can proceed, then those people are going to be blocked until the responds.
It's simply not polite to let people sit on their asses for a half day waiting for a response.
> If those other people need a question answered before they can proceed, then those people are going to be blocked until the responds.
This is where I'm not seeing it. It sounds like the gallery employee we're talking about is working with several artists at once. Which gives them plenty of things to do.
And if the hours are long, then 4 of them are significantly less than half a day.
A day and a half is slow even in software, and software doesn't have things like the example given of wanting a wall put up then asking for it to be taken down again.
Sure, software does have bad communicators who change their minds, but revert is relatively easy.
We're talking about half a day, not a day and a half. Or really, less than half a day.
> and software doesn't have things like the example given of wanting a wall put up then asking for it to be taken down again.
The wall example was taking place over "weeks". If there is still an urgent question about wall-building a few days out then it sounds like someone waited much too long and that's the real problem, not the extra four hours.
If everyone is there to set up your exhibition at a certain agreed upon time, then you should be engaged and answering any questions immediately if not sooner, regardless of how long it takes to set up the exhibition.
Certain agreed upon time? Yes, of course. You should probably be there for most of it too.
But once you're covering multiple days, no, a single person should not be expected to respond lightning fast the entire time. And the several day scenario is what the comment I replied to talked about.
On the other hand, without warning going dark for 4 work day hours a few days before exhibition would look terrible if any serious question came up.
So I don't think it's literally responding within the hour, but it comes pretty dang close. You have to keep in mind that being an artist creating art and being an artist setting up an exhibition are basically two different jobs and if you end up doing them in parallel at the same time, that's your problem right there.