if you have a large ego and you are an editor or gallery owner, you are an asshole.
when you have a large ego in either of these positions, or any position of power over the art of others, you don’t realize that your entire career and every accomplishment in your profession is built on the work of other people, and that very little of their success can be attributed to you and whatever TASTE you think you have created.
i’ll go as far as to say that TASTE is a misnomer for cohesive content. if you pass on work that is not relevant to your publication or gallery, it is not because of TASTE that you did this. it is because the work failed to be significant in whatever focus your publication/venue respects. a focus which, unfortunately, will have nothing to do with your personal TASTE, should you be successful and honest with yourself and the community that you may have had a hand in creating.
also, regardless of IF you created something NEAT or RELEVANT, you should stand with that NEAT or RELEVANT thing, not behind or on it.
artists determine content. if you are an asshole editor/gallery owner, you try to change artists into what you think they should be, and this is a form of lying and subversion of otherwise pure ideas; also, it is a form of being a piece-of-shit.
YOU, EDITOR/GALLERY OWNER, DO NOT MAKE THE ART YOU PUBLISH/SHOW. therefore, your success is not built upon the quality of the work, but in the way that you promote that work and help the artist succeed in a way the artist feels comfortable with.
here are the two ways you can succeed at your job, editor/gallery owner/person with supreme heavy command power over whatever art related thing:
1. expose people to the writing/art/whatever.
2. uphold the artistic integrity of the writing/art/whatever.
if you, editor/gallery owner/person with an extreme and unholy super-power over all that is supreme and excellent and uniformly built upon your gracious and double gracious knowledge, do this, then you are successful, undeserving of any ego, and a good person for everyone who makes art to be associated with.
if you do not do this, and nothing else, then you are a sack of shit who should immediately stop serving your own harmful and destructive ego, stop drinking and doing drugs, stop whatever else has been making you venomous and delusional, and work a job where none of this matters and you can feel good about stabbing people in their gut while you wrangle some kind of worth out of the piss-dirt you have unknowingly shit yourself in.