There are few self-congratulatory terms in the world of journalism other than “deep dive,” but Bianca Bosker has earned the right to have those two words tattooed anywhere on her body she wants. She doesn’t sit down and study her material in depth, she dives right into it, crashes through closed ecosystems that have nothing to do with her, and emerges as a leading expert. In his 2017 debut, Cork Dork, Bosker was brave enough to infiltrate the world of wine snobs and attempt to pass the notoriously tough sommelier test (spoiler alert: he did). The final object of the New Yorker’s fascination and frustration is the field of contemporary art, a micro-society populated by uber-cool gallerists, uber-wealthy collectors, and countless starving artists and pathetic wannabes running Seesaw practices. and I’m trying to fit 15 gallery openings into one Thursday night.
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“It took over my life,” is how she describes the process of reporting Get the Picture, a bold and humorous account of her years working as a gallery girl, studio assistant and security guard at the Guggenheim Museum. “I don’t think I had any idea at the beginning the extent to which this would take over my life or how long it would take.” Part of the problem was gaining access. “I felt like an FBI agent interviewing the mob,” she says of her efforts to gain art-world resources. The message he kept hearing was: Stand back. There were even threats. “They didn’t come right out and threaten my safety or anything,” Bosker says. “But my reputation, my well-being and my livelihood as a journalist; that was another story.” When some people heard about his project, they stated that they would love every word they read if he made it happen.
Their concerns carry a certain meaning. As Bosker’s book reveals, the art world depends on a web of secrecy to protect the social and economic capital of a select few and to justify astronomical price tags. “If we are told that we cannot understand art without spending years at art fairs, getting a master’s degree, memorizing the artist encyclopedia and wearing the right jeans, the importance of these gatekeepers becomes much greater,” says Bosker.
While studying the Bat Signals and slang of the art world, he began to make friends and learn to speak their language. Not that it’s easy. Although their questions were completely harmless, very few of them could answer directly. Instead, his curiosity was met with criticism, even from those who agreed to spend time with him. He asked too many questions. His clothes were so boring. His emails were very long and made him seem very unimportant. The resting bitch’s face was completely hopeless.
In his book, he dares to break the strange codes and conventions of the contemporary art world; For example, why is it completely rude to call something “beautiful” or why do gallerists have to say they “installed” a painting rather than declaring it “beautiful”? Did they “sell” it? “Artspeak is an exclusionary code where every word has to be bigger than it needs to be,” he explains. “The more syllables, the better. He has a way of discussing things in an unnecessarily complicated way and speaking in a voice that makes it sound like your batteries are dying. If you’re reading an artist’s description and wondering why it doesn’t sound like regular English, Bosker has a theory for you: Artspeak, he suggests, emerged in the 1970s when critics tried to imitate the cumbersomely translated essays of French scholars.
But his intention was not to mock a society that some see as an espresso-infused punch line. He was a talented artist growing up and even considered becoming an artist before getting carried away with getting straight As in college. He was now 37 years old and wanted to know the essential joy he had lost along the way. Whenever he looked at the artwork, his gaze was directed towards the writing on the wall. He felt like he was missing the world of emotion and expression that existed before his eyes. “I felt like I had seriously misunderstood something very important to my humanity,” he says.
His determination won out, and he began shadowing those inside, painting gallery walls, stretching canvases, and being their plus-one at parties. He spent time with an angry gallerist, a couple of slightly less angry gallerists, and museum guards. She got lost in the weeklong sweep of the Miami Art Fair (where she cosplayed as a gallery employee and racked up an impressive sales figure). She also apprenticed under artist Julie Curtiss and internet-famous performance artist Mandy allFIRE, whose work involves manipulating her butt and sitting on objects and people (Bosker won her over at a Gowanus event by letting the artist rest her cool body on top of him).
The more time Bosker spent reporting, the more obvious it became that when people talk about art, they’re often talking about everything except the work itself. In a world where a painting sells for $1,200 only to be flipped at auction two years later for $600,000, context is crucial. To the Bosker reader, this means where an artist went to graduate school, who they became friends with, where they had exhibited their work before, who graced them with a “studio visit” (whatever that means). entered the game.
“I asked a gallerist to give me an opinion on someone’s work, as if he were sleeping with a much more famous artist,” Bosker recalls. “There’s an implication that you can’t possibly understand a work unless you’ve spent years reading Clement Greenberg, you know, popping into art fairs and loving to memorize things like social networks in the Down East Side. As one gallerist told me, if you don’t understand the context, you can’t understand what you’re looking at.” ”
He shut down with this message and doubled down, trying to educate himself. He wanted to understand how art was made and train his eyes to see things in new ways. “Spending time with artists in their studios and talking to me about their decisions showed me something different. Everything you need to have a meaningful experience with art is right in front of you.”
Bosker’s book takes an alternately sidelong and broad-eyed approach. “I came away from this experience thinking the velvet ropes, stilted language, and deliberately malicious attitude were unnecessary,” he says. “Art can move us and stand on its own; It can move us without elaborate secrecy and snobbery.”
These days, he says, he finds art in unusual places; for example, the sight of steam coming from a sidewalk vent or the fleet of Mr. Softee ice cream trucks idling on a street corner. As a writer, he is also more adaptable, more patient and observant. “Our brains are like garbage compactors,” he says. “The way we perceive the world involves condensing and compressing information. And I think looking at art is an education in grasping all the beauty and chaos of the world around us.”