You may have heard of some art gallery owners who say, under their breath, of course, that they would prefer to see only serious collectors over regular foot traffic enter their galleries. You might also have gasped at the price tags on some of the art pieces at high-end galleries. Or maybe you’ve also questioned, given the price of the original Gustave Baumann you’re looking at, whether your shorts and T-shirt are appropriate gallery attire.
You may have also looked at a piece and wondered what in the world you were even looking at and why it is considered art and worth half your mortgage: Remember that painting of one line on a white canvas, or that goat in a tutu standing atop a glass eye? Or Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal?
Bianca Bosker, journalist and author of the informative and humorous Get the Picture, wondered about all of those issues too. She questioned the attitude of the people involved in the art world — as well as her inability to commune with art in the first place, be it at a fancy art gallery on the Upper East Side in Manhattan or at the MoMA.
Bosker grew up making art but somewhere along the way lost her understanding of it and the joy it once brought her.
“I was very frustrated with my relationship with art at the outset,” she says via a recent phone interview with Pasatiempo. “It felt like for most of my adult life, art and I were not on speaking terms. And I really wanted to change that.”
She asked herself, “Why does art matter?” and “How can any of us engage with it more deeply?”
Author Bianca Bosker
In Get the Picture, she ventures into the deepest bowels of the art world to understand it, to understand how the pricing of art works, to learn to dress for the occasion, and to develop her “eye.”
Bosker, who writes for such outlets as The New Yorker, The New York Times, TheWall Street Journal, The Guardian, Food & Wine, and The Atlantic, often practices immersive journalism. To learn about the art world, she began by attending all the art events she could at a variety of venues, and would speak — or try to speak — to everyone in the know, hoping to find what in investigative journalism is called “the donkey”: the source that leads the journalist to the heart of the machine.
She finds her donkey (more on that later) and jumps head-first into an all-immersive experience among artists, gallerists, art dealers, serious art collectors with mansions dedicated to storing and showing art, and museum security guards.
She learns to speak International Art English. She paints many gallery walls white (an aesthetic of the “white cube” in art spaces that, to her and her readers’ shock, dates back to Nazi Germany). She sells thousands of dollars’ worth of art at a fair, curates from afar an exhibition in Hong Kong, writes social media posts for galleries, allows a performance artist to — in so many words — perform on her face, helps out around art studios, stretches pre-painted or to-be-painted canvases, and grabs taxis with coke-sniffing art lovers.
And along the way, she learns one of the most crucial secrets of the trade, which the “donkey” in this story — Jack Barrett, then the owner of 315 Gallery in Brooklyn and now the owner of Jack Barrett Gallery in Manhattan — imparts upon her. The experiences she recounts in her book in turn help explain some of what we may have observed or experienced at galleries.
In Get the Picture she writes, “Talking shit was essentially a job requirement. ‘It’s almost impossible not to be a gossip in the art world,’ Jack [Barrett] insisted. ‘If you exist in the art world, you have to talk about the art world. ... Gossip for art people is like echolocation for bats: You sent out signals of what you thought was great and derivative or phony, then oriented yourself based on what came back.’”
Although she never manages to dress according to the unspoken fashion standards of elite art watchers — meaning, she never wears the right pair of jeans to commune with a given masterpiece — she does develop her “eye.” And she realizes this: In the elite art world, context matters more than form.
“I was surprised by how little time many art connoisseurs spent discussing the merits of the artwork themselves,” she tells Pasatiempo. “I felt like all the emphasis on context was one more way to exclude the rest of us. Connoisseurs become a lot more important if we’re told that we need years of going to art fairs, familiarity with artists, biographies, several advanced degrees, and the right pair of jeans to commune with a painting.”
Tom Wolfe, journalist and author of The Painted Word (Picador, 2008), would have rejoiced in the hypocrisy of connoisseurs ennobling themselves when, in fact, anyone can enjoy and understand art.
But fret not, perplexed gallerygoer: Art galleries are, as Bosker puts it, glorified art stores. And as long as you are respectful of the space, the people who work there, and the art on display, you have just as much right to walk in there as anyone else — even in shorts and a T-shirt and with however much money you have in your pocket.
And that’s because art, and art interpretation, is for the people. ◀
Ania Hull is a journalist who moved to New Mexico from Hong Kong. She writes about a plethora of topics, including art, and used to teach art history. And because her mother is an artist, she’s been a gallery- and museumgoer all her life (but rarely dresses for the occasion).
