Get the Picture – book review

In this brilliant and amusing book, journalist Bianca Bosker infiltrates the world of art and the gallerists, collectors, curators and artists who people it. In her effort to understand what makes good art, she treks to numerous art shows, spends hours painting a gallery wall white and even allows a performance artist to sit on her face

Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, published by Allen & Unwin.

reviewed by CHRISTIANA SPENS

Bianca Bosker is advised early on that her planned infiltration into the art world is unwise. “You’ll make some powerful enemies,” warned a seasoned collector. “It’s not worth it for you living in New York.” Then, she says, an art dealer told her: “He would have no qualms trashing my reputation – personal, professional and psychological – if I wrote anything he disagreed with. ‘Nice career you’ve got there – be a shame if something happened to it.’”

Bosker remains unfazed: after all, this is not her first endeavour of this kind. In her 2017 book Cork Dork, she reveals how she plunged herself into the world of fine wines and sensitive, slippery tongues, eager to understand the social workings and refined palettes of another kind of connoisseur. Now, in Get the Picture, she immerses herself in the world of gallerists, collectors, curators and artists, hoping to train her eye, to find the holy grail of aesthetic experience, the precious thing that this odd, obsessive industry is supposedly so desperate to uncover, covet and keep. What are they sacrificing so much for, what are they hiding with such paranoid fervour? Bosker is troubled and yet enthralled by these clawing, moneyed gatekeepers and the hopelessly devoted artists at their feet.

“Most artists I met were working at least two jobs, and their art lived better than they did, sleeping soundly in the studio while they woke up on a friend’s couch covered in cat pee,” she says. “And for what? Beyond the handful of acquaintances they convinced to come to their studios, their art rarely got seen. They had to do mental math to decide if they could afford a bagel, and the advice they got was to ‘give up now’. Yet they kept giving everything they had to make objects that were supposed to show us something, communicate something, do something. And it drove me crazy that, despite a long relationship with art and a very expensive education, I couldn’t clearly discern what that was. I’d never met a group of humans willing to sacrifice so much to create something of so little obvious practical value.”

With this in mind, Bosker takes an almost military approach to her project, outlining several areas to infiltrate and gather intelligence (New York galleries, art fairs, afterparties), therein finding her sources and her targets – the gallerists, collectors and curators, and the artists themselves. She starts out seemingly lacking in social awareness, cool, or an eye for art, which is itself a source of slapstick comedy and general amusement, and gives an endearing perspective on what is and remains a deeply ridiculous industry, circling a nevertheless profoundly important human behaviour.

“Try a simpler hobby, I encouraged myself. Bake bread. Pickle,” she says. “And it was tempting, really it was, only I couldn’t stop thinking I had to be missing out on something major because the art I was seeing inspired such extremes of devotion – on the part of not only viewers … but also the artists themselves. I knew artists had a centuries-old reputation for being masochistic obsessives who’d sell a kidney for a tube of paint, but that looked relatively painless compared to what I was witnessing. I met artists who skipped meals, sleep, surgeries, having kids, seeing dying parents, and putting a roof over their heads in order to pour every last drop of themselves into making their work, with no end in sight except the art itself.”

This is the paradox, of course: how can such an innate human practice, as necessary and inbuilt, she tells us, as the desire for sex and food, be managed by this freakish industry, obsessed not exactly by art itself, but by the social rituals built around it, which the art then expresses, challenges and contradicts? The art world is to art what the porn industry is to sex, in this sense, but in this phenomenon Bosker sees a way to understand the weirdness of human behaviour on a greater scale. “I kept trekking to art shows, hoping to be moved, and while the art didn’t do it for me, the humans around it fascinated me. Like people who join cults or travel to space, art connoisseurs had the peculiar aura of the transformed.”

Get the Picture is an anthropological survey of the art world as well as a treasure hunt. Not long into Bosker’s journey it becomes clear that this study is as concerned about the rules surrounding the art as the aesthetic experience itself. It is about the people who are deciding the rules, submitting to them, doubting them, flouting them, engaging in a dance of interactions around peculiar social conventions and the ever-present threat of exclusion and stigmatisation. “Everyone I met … had offered the same pair of contradictory caveats: There are somany art worlds, and the art world is sosmall. I took this to mean that the art world was unknowable, but you were not, so you’d better watch yourself. ‘The art world is built on reputation. It’s all what people think of you,’ said a gallerist, a piece of advice that came out sounding like a threat.”

Yet the thrill and compulsion this inspires in its participants is fascinating, even for the Enemy, as she is branded early on, even as she is welcomed in – as much as anyone is ever welcomed in – with sarcastic comments about her outfits and a list of demands. Bosker’s need to thoroughly research her book, and her connected subservience to some art world players, provides an easy parallel for the hierarchical behaviours that underpin the entire industry as well as its perverse, enduring allure. One of many very funny moments occurs when her first boss (she is undertaking an internship at and up-and-coming New York gallery) asks her to paint a wall white before a show. “I listened as Jack rattled off an endless list of instructions on how to properly paint a white wall,” she says. “Excuse the stoner sentiment, but have you ever looked at a white wall? Like, really looked? That wall and I communed. Ever notice the raised scars of dried paint drips? Or how paint morphs before your eyes, so it’s thick and shiny when it goes on (and you think you’ve finally –finally – done your final coat) but then – whoa! – the stuff underneath shows up again? Do not believe what you’ve heard: Watching paint dry is an adventure.”

Bosker goes on to trace the proliferation of white walls and bright overhead lightning in gallery spaces back to the Nazis (“a design ethos that failed artist Adolf Hitler praised as a brick-and-mortar manifestation of his quest for ‘cultural purification’. From then on, the look became so popular that, historian Charlotte Klonk observes, ‘one is almost tempted to speak of the white cube as a Nazi invention.’”)

Bosker is instructed by her new boss to help build an additional wall so that each piece in the exhibition can have “its own plane”, and this somehow leads to Bosker being inserted inside the wall itself, so that Jack can “properly close each side of the wall”, which she compares, at one point, to a spacious coffin. “What if this is just a hazing ritual for you, and I wasn’t going to put a wall in the show,” Jack jokes, before shooting another screw near her thigh. “Alright Bianca,” Jack calls from above her: “This is where your life ends.” He was right, Bosker recalls. “And I was thrilled.” 

The perverse dynamics aren’t lost on the author, and yet she keeps a level head. Though she enjoys her immersion, finding comic moments at each turn, she remains detached and analytical at her core. Thus, her social faux pas are endearing, and one suspects slightly hammed up; she is playing the role of ingenue and she does it well. In a later chapter, Bosker goes along to a show of a performance artist, allFIRE, whose press release initially puts her off: inviting guests to lay on a sheet while the artist sits on their face seems a bit over the top. However, giving into peer pressure and a desire for novelty, Bosker tags along. At first repulsed by the spectacle, she ends up participating in the performance. “When I try to think back to that moment, all I see is a solid black expanse where my brain should be. Did I think it through? I wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought it through.” Yet, for all the strangeness, she experiences a sense of peace in a moment of suffocation and exposure. Next thing she knows, she is interviewing the artist. She is no longer repulsed but intrigued, hooked, writing all about it. As the critic Leo Steinberg had explained, this sort of phenomenon was “a kind of turbulence theorem”. As Tom Wolfe put it: “He had resisted it. He had fought to cling to his values – and then realised he was wrong. If a new work of art or a new style disturbed you, it was probably a good work. If you hated it—it was probably great.”

Bosker’s experience with the performance artist reveals inherent sadomasochistic aspects of the art world, also recalling Philippa Snow’s debut, Which As You Know Means Violence (2022), in which the author prods the parallels between masochistic contemporary artists and the performative self-injury of pranksters such as Johnny Knoxville, co-creator and star of the MTV reality show Jackass. Bosker also finds in her own practice, the writing of this book, a parallel in this desire to be immersed, to surrender to the strange group by which she is fascinated. There is clearly a cultish quality to the art world and art practice more generally, a group enthralled by the taboo, by quasi-spiritual practices and ideals. There is an ever-present tussle between the desire for excess and for purity, around which different factions order and identify themselves.

While some artists (and gallerists, collectors and visitors) fervently seek simplicity, flatness, nothingness, cleanliness, and even the death of the ego; others desire defilement of that clean visual plain, that empty room, of any virtuous, untroubled mind. Even theorisation (or rather, over-theorisation) is part of the practice and becomes so overbearing at times that it cleanses the art world of art itself, as if a cult must dispense of its own members. Here, Bosker’s investigation recalls Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book The Painted Word, an entertaining commentary on the phenomenon of modern art, the domineering role of theorist-critics, and the various social rituals and personalities playing into it all, particularly in 1960s and 70s New York. While Bosker’s latest work has a more immersive, anthropological perspective, it chimes nicely with Wolfe’s unpicking of the mental games and competitive performativity of the players of the industry, revealing how the circus-like art world came to be how it is. He explains the origins of the scene that Bosker now reports on – that is, the mad riffing and theorisation, the competitive criticism of warring mid-century cliques.

Revealing the swings and roundabouts of the move from abstract expressionism to post-painterly abstraction to pop art to minimalism to conceptual art, with photo realism bankrolling the galleries so they could show the “fuck-you art” in the meantime, Wolfe gleefully reports on the sublimination of art into theory, imagining at the end of the book a future in which an exhibition just shows wall texts. “Every art student will marvel over the fact that a whole generation of artists devoted their careers to getting the Word (and to internalising it) and to the extraordinary task of divesting themselves of whatever there was in their imagination and technical ability that did not fit the Word. They will listen to art historians say, with the sort of smile now reserved for the study of Phrygian astrology: ‘That’s how it was then!’ … The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-world war 2 way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word. What happy hours await them all! With what sniggers, laughter, and good-humoured amazement they will look back upon the era of the Painted Word!”  

Yet here we are in 2024, just as Wolfe left us, and Bosker confirms it. People still struggle to get the picture, to see art directly and immediately, without the instruction of theory, or some whittled-down derivation. However, rather than leave us with this art world, or damn it entirely, she simply points in another direction. “It’s over there!” she says, turning to neuroscience to better understand the aesthetic experience, and why we value it so highly. The thing that draws people to art in the first place (not just the money, or prestige, or procrastination) is a key to a more expansive world, a widening of our vision, a pushing of boundaries, a sense of beauty and devotion that is profoundly transformative. This need goes beyond art, though art is one way to chase it, and the industry is just one launchpad among many where we can fling ourselves into a new world, vacillating between sublime chaos and the sweet silence of an emptied, surrendered mind. Bosker has written a riotous, clever, immersive story of art in which sensuality is centred, and ultimately triumphs over the industry around it; she succeeds brilliantly.

• Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker is published by Allen & Unwin, price £20