INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“This book is sheer pleasure: the best book I’ve ever read about contemporary art.” —Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Sontag, and The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters
The New York Times bestselling author of Cork Dork takes readers on another fascinating, hilarious, and revelatory journey—this time burrowing deep inside the impassioned, secretive world of art and artists
An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.
In Get the Picture, Bosker throws herself into the nerve center of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators, and, of course, artists themselves—the kind who work multiple jobs to afford their studios while scrabbling to get eyes on their art. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly-naked performance artist, and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for hours on end while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonization machine but also a more expansive way of living.
Probing everything from cave paintings to Instagram, and from the science of sight to the importance of beauty as it examines art’s role in our culture, our economy, and our hearts, Get the Picture is a rollicking adventure that will change the way you see forever.
AUTHOR Q&A
What is GET THE PICTURE about?
GET THE PICTURE is about the years I spent disowning my normal life as a journalist to sell art at galleries, help artists in their studios, patrol museum wings as a security guard, and more—all as part of a journey to understand why art matters and how any of us can engage with it more deeply. To me, the book is part user guide to the hidden logic of the art world, part quest to live more beautifully. “Beauty” is a dirty word in the art world these days. It’s also, I came to see, essential.
You’ve written about wine, witches, mass extinction, and more. What made you turn your focus to art?
When it came to visual art, I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t belong. And yet art, scientists tell us, is a fundamental part of being human—“as necessary as food or sex.” I felt like my hyper-optimized life was missing something, and as I started poking around the art world, I quickly became obsessed with the art fiends I met. They picked fights with the color blue. They maxed out credit cards to show hunks of metal they swore could change the world, or treated paintings like they were as necessary as vital organs. I’d never met a group of humans willing to sacrifice so much for something of so little obvious practical value, and I couldn’t stop wondering: Why? Why do we engage with art anyway? Can a few smears of colored rock on cloth—a “painting” as it’s more commonly known—really transform our existence? These art lovers acted like they’d accessed a trap door in their brains and my own life felt claustrophobic compared to their expansive approach. I wanted to know if I could see art—and the world—the way they did, and what would change if I could. So I threw myself in.
You ended up working in the art world, instead of just interviewing people as many journalists might do. Why the immersive approach?
There’s no substitute for learning by doing. It’s one thing for a gallerist to explain how they sell art. It’s another to spend eight hours a day on your feet during Art Basel Miami negotiating with millionaires and finalizing deals from the backseat of an Uber surrounded by people hroonfing up lines of cocaine. Inserting myself into the middle of the action was, to me, the best way I knew to get honest answers to the fundamental questions at the core of our relationship with art: Why did a gallery pick this painting over that one, why’d an artist choose to put that green there, why does that sculpture make a curator weak at the knees. I wanted to see how an artwork goes from the germ of an idea in a studio to a celebrated masterpiece at a museum because all the decisions that shape that artwork are also decisions that shape us: our idea of art, who makes it, and why we should bother to engage. In the process, I discovered just how messy so-called “fine art” can be.
What surprised you the most during your research for GET THE PICTURE?
I’ve done reporting in China, where talking to a journalist like me can get you thrown in jail, and yet nothing prepared me for how secretive the art world would be. I began reaching out to people, trying to get art experts to talk to me, and instead of answers, I got threats. Warnings. Many, many, many closed doors—plus lots of lectures about all the things wrong with my clothes and “overly-enthusiastic” personality. Except the more people told me to stay away from the art world, the more determined I was to get inside, then share what I learned.
Also, having my face sat on by a lingerie-clad performance artist—that surprised me. I didn’t see that one coming.
Why is the art world so secretive?
Well, let me say first of all that it’s not only journalists who get the silent treatment. Galleries regularly withhold their prices, decline to sell you things even though they’re for sale, and hide their storefronts on second floors so they won’t get average joes wandering in. The art world wields strategic snobbery to build mystique. Except I don’t agree that art needs all the velvet ropes and artspeak to enthrall or move us. At the same time, the art world also sees its secrecy as key to its survival. The art industry is a bit like the mafia: You take a vow of silence because people do things that look insane, unethical, fanatical, and absurd to the outside world. Unless you’ve sworn a blood oath to uphold the orthodoxy, you’re a risk.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about art or the art world?
I’d always thought of art as a luxury—I mean, it can’t feed you, house you, or be used to kill predators. But I was surprised to discover that scientists are right there with artists in insisting art is fundamental to being human. Despite the way we often discuss it, art isn’t optional or only for the rich. Art is one of our species’ oldest creations (we invented paint long before the wheel) and one of our earliest means of communication (we drew long, long, long before we could write). As I embedded myself with the sort researchers who’ll strap eye-tracking goggles on tourists at art museums, I was fascinated to learn all the ways that science shows art is crucial to our existence. For instance, our sense of sight isn’t nearly as trustworthy as we think. Vision is really a hallucination—we don’t see like video cameras, dispassionately recording the scenes around us—and all the data entering our eyes is shaped by our brains’ “filters of expectation,” which preemptively dismiss, ignore, and prioritize the raw data even before we get the full picture, so to speak. Our brains are essentially trash compactors, constantly compressing the information coming in. But art helps us fight the reducing tendencies of our mind. There are lots of theories for why our species evolved to embrace art (including that it helps us survive), and one of them maintains that art—like dreams—introduces pleasurable, powerful glitches that keep our brains nimble and open to new experiences. Art isn’t always pleasant, but that’s often part of its power. The glitch that art introduces to our brains is a gift.
Art is such a huge topic. How did you decide to focus on the people and topics you did?
I immediately gravitated toward up-and-coming artists because to me they represent the highest-stakes but least-covered part of the art world. These are people for whom selling a painting might be the difference between their gallery surviving or not, or who scrimp on rent so their art gets to sleep soundly in the studio while they wake up on a friend’s couch covered in cat pee. Their relentless dedication blew me away, plus I’d always wondered what it was really like for artists today trying to elbow their way into the annals of art history. As I read up on the art world, I also found it puzzling that different parts of the art world tend to get discussed in isolation: There’ll be a biography of an artist, or a treatise on the market. But the way the art “machine” works, to really understand art today and why it matters, I think we have to see how all the pieces—galleries, studios, museums, money—fit together. That’s why I worked in all the places I did. What I discovered about how art gets valued, why people buy it, and who gets ahead isn’t romantic, yet I think seeing behind the fairytale is crucial to help us smartly navigate this world.
What changed for you as a result of reporting and writing this book?
Once I started sniffing around the art world, artists quickly diagnosed me as suffering from a worrisome condition: I was missing an “Eye”—not the organ, but a painstakingly-cultivated outlook they said enables us to see lots that doesn’t meet the eye, like who’ll be the next Warhol, or what’s transcendent about a sculpture of limp vegetables on a stained mattress. Artists told me this lack of “visual literacy” was downright dangerous in a world so saturated with pictures. So with their help, I started to cultivate my “Eye.” Gradually, I saw art differently. But I also began to see everything differently. It’s hard for me to walk down the street now and not dash off to savor, say, the radiant orange of a brick wall. I learned to see beauty where I never did before. Also, my taste is unrecognizable. I used to gravitate toward artwork that connoisseurs dismissively refer to as “couch art” (a.k.a. “colorful painting”). Now, so-called “fuck-you art” has a real place in my heart (though I’m not afraid to call out pretension when I see it). I’ve learned to trust myself around art and engage with it on my own terms. I hope my book will help others do that, too.