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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. This time yesterday, we spent the hour discussing how to thrift clothes and furniture ethically, but still having a lot of fun, so many of you called in with great suggestions of places where to go. Wanted to let people know that audio is up now and available via our podcast, as well as our show page at wnyc.org.

Also, I want to let you know, we think by Friday the transcript will be up as well. You can actually see all of those locations and names in print if that is your jam. Just want to let you know because a lot of folks reached out and wanted to know about the places. They are there for you, and they will be there for you in print very soon. That is in the future. Right now, let's get this hour started with a look inside the world of art.

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Bianca Bosker begins her new book like this, "To be fair, everyone warned me it was a bad idea. What I wanted to do was not only impossible, but vaguely dangerous, they intimated. They didn't come right out and threaten my safety or anything. My reputation, well-being, and livelihood as a journalist, that, however, was another story." No, she's not talking about covering politics or the CIA or organized crime.

She just wanted to get inside the world of art, but it turns out that Chelsea gallerists and Brooklyn performance artists can be just as secretive and suspicious as undercover spies. The book is called Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. In order to write, Bianca went headfirst into the art world. She was an intern for a Brooklyn gallery owner who obsessed over the right white paint for his walls. She sold photographs in Miami to collectors who argued over which home to put them in.

She works as a guard at the Guggenheim. She was an artist assistant to painter Julie Curtiss and an advisor to a performance artist whose main subject was her very own large derrière. Through it all, Bianca tries to understand the fundamental questions: what makes art good, and how do you know it when you see it, and who are the decision makers in a field that can be so subjective? Bianca Bosker will be speaking tomorrow at Rizzoli Bookstore at 6:00 PM, but she joins me now in studio. Welcome to WNYC.

Bianca Bosker: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: Listeners who are involved in the art world, we want to hear from you. We know you listen. [chuckles] Have you ever worked in a gallery, a museum, or as an artist assistant? Are you an artist yourself? What is something from your experience in the art world that was inspiring or disappointing, or just really surprising? What do you think people should know about the art world in New York? Our phone lines are open.

212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC is our number. You may call in and join us on air. You can also text to us at that number. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. If you'd like to remain anonymous, because you want to spill some tea, you can DM us at Instagram. We promise we will keep your identity unknown. @allofitwnyc is our Instagram. You talk about how hard it was to get people to speak on the record, Bianca. Why do you think it was so hard to get people in the art world to talk to you?

Bianca Bosker: Yes. I should say, first of all, it was an admittedly pushy plan that I had. [laughter] I am a journalist, and like a lot of journalists, I do interviews, I read research reports, but I also believe in learning by doing. I wanted to work in the art world and then report back on what I found. When I started talking to people about this, as you alluded to, instead of answers, I got threats and warnings.

Even once I got inside, my first boss encouraged me to get a makeover, basically. [laughs] He told me verbatim one afternoon, "I hate to break it to you, but you're not the coolest cat in the art world. Having you around is just lowering my coolness." I think that the art world does wield this strategic snobbery to keep people out. I was surprised by that. I thought I was going to encounter this world full of open-minded iconoclasts who believed in embracing as many people as possible in the warm hug of art.

There are those people. There's that rebel alliance that believes that art, even cutting-edge art, is for everyone, that it's not a luxury. It is a necessity, and that everything you need to have a meaningful experience of art is right in front of you. At the same time, there is a big faction that wants to keep out the Shlomoterian as they see it. I think there's almost a mob-like mentality where I think things that happen in the art world would pass for absurd, criminal, and unethical anywhere else.

If you haven't taken a vow of silence to uphold the omertà, you're a liability. At the same time, I think that strategic snobbery, whether it's hiding prices or speaking in the made-up language of art speak, is a way to build mystique and concentrate power in the hands of gatekeepers. Art doesn't need that. It definitely doesn't need that.

Alison Stewart: Why were people afraid? What were people afraid of if they spoke with you? Were they afraid of losing their status? Were they afraid of alienating power brokers? What was the fear?

Bianca Bosker: I think that it's the sense of wanting to control the flow of information. I think that one of the ways that the art world tries to build mystique is by just generally withholding information. Straightforwardness is uncouth. One of my boss's advices to a colleague on dealing with buyers was say little as possible. Being borderline hostile is cool. One dealer told me, "Some collectors, they want you to treat them rudely."

I think this concern of, if you think about it, being told that we need connoisseurs, if we're told that we need years of going to art fairs, an advanced degree, and the right pair of jeans to commune with a painting, these gatekeepers and connoisseurs become a lot more important. It really wasn't until I started working with up-and-coming artists as a studio assistant in their studio that I began to discover a different way of looking at art. One that didn't rely on context, the web of names around a piece or an artist, the social capital.

I was struck by the way that a lot of the art connoisseurs that I was meeting spent surprisingly little time discussing the merits of the artworks themselves. Instead, they asked questions like, "Where did the artist go to school? Who owns their work? Who is he sleeping with?"

Alison Stewart: Sounds like you had a more fulfilling experience with the artists, rather than the apparatus around the artists.

Bianca Bosker: Yes. It was a mixture. I think I also had incredible experiences working at galleries, working as a security guard at a museum. Something really did click for me when I sat there on artists' studio floors stretching canvases and painting backgrounds. I think that in galleries, we hear a lot about indexicality and historicity. None of that prepared me for the blistery business of actually making art.

Making art, as many of your listeners probably know themselves, is practically athletic. I lost patches of arm hair to a sculpture. I watched artists sweating for hours to get the right shade of gray. I was really dead set on developing my eye. Seeing artists at work helped me learn to savor art like an artist. I needed to slow down, examine the physical form, and pay attention to artists' decisions, which I think is not what we're encouraged to do in this day and age.

The last hundred years or so, we've been told that what really matters about art these days is the idea behind it. The thought trumps the thing. As the artist Julie Curtiss told me when I was working for her, "An idea is not a painting. Painting is," as she said, "constant decision-making. Those decisions offer us a pathway into the piece." I think that allows us to cut through the context, to cut through the gatekeepers and experience art on our own terms.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Bianca Bosker, the name of the book is Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. Let's talk to Kimberly, who's calling in from Brooklyn, who also works with the Guggenheim. Hi, Kimberly. Thanks for calling. You're on the air.

Kimberly: Hi. I'm going to just turn down the radio here, so I can hear myself and you. Happy to be on the air. I'm so thrilled about this topic.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Kimberly: I also went through the rigors of being in many galleries, working for many galleries as a someone who cleaned the bathroom, dust the sculptures. I was a registrar, and then I worked my way up through six different galleries to director. Then, I left that world and moved on to museum educator at the Guggenheim, which I've been doing for the last 24 years in New York, and I love. I'm also an art advisor, and I teach adult classes around the city.

I think what I wanted to share most is that there is no one way of sharing art or approaching art or discerning art with groups. I try to read, as I say, read the room, and rather than lecture, I ask questions, and I turn it into a discussion about art. I really feel like that validates everyone in the room or everyone in the group. I just wish that it had been like that when I was coming up.

I was always lectured at arms were folded, people always have that sort of veil in front of them and you, and they're afraid to be called on, but when you make it a chat, and it is a democratic experience, and you start with there's no wrong answer, it's amazing how arms unfold, body language is relaxed, and people are willing to share their own lived experience by looking at that one work of art. Then we all learned something new about a work of art through everyone's lived experience. That's my two cents if it helps.

Alison Stewart: Excellent two cents. Kimberly, thank you for calling in.

Bianca Bosker: I love that. I think I have a confession to make, and I don't know if Kimberly will approve of this, but kind of apropos of that, I think that I often felt like wall labels and museums were almost like the right answer at the bottom of a word search. I, at least initially as someone who came into this, truly not really knowing how to engage with art. I didn't know how to do art. That's part of what started me on this journey. Going to museums and galleries reliably made me feel like I was two tattoos and a master's degree away from figuring out what was going on.

I used to think it was downright rude when galleries and museums didn't put these paragraph-long descriptions of the work on the side, but when I started working as a guard, I started standing in front of the wall labels because I felt like they really limited people's experiences and interpretations of the work, and they would sort of jump to and assume that was the answer. There was one right way into it. Definitely what Kimberly is saying certainly resonates.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to John who's calling in from Hell's Kitchen. Hi, John.

John: Hi, Alison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing well. Thank you for calling in.

John: Well, thank you. I used to work for a company in Chelsea, Atomic Design, and we used to do the wall text for museums and art galleries and stuff like that. I have a background in graphic arts, but not fine art. What I learned about fine art is it's just-- to understand fine art, of course, there is the serial experience of looking at a piece and getting what it means, what it makes you feel, and stuff, but also what's really important is, just like any industry, like the legal profession, there is legalese. There is a language to describe the industry, and there's a vocabulary that you have to, you don't have to, but that you should expose yourself to.

The best way to do that is by reading art reviews, just getting in the habit of reading art reviews. Just like any form of study, eventually you start seeing the patterns and you start understanding the language. Then, when you go to art galleries, I made it a point of picking up the artist's statement at the front desk. You would look at a work first, perhaps experiencing what it makes you feel, and then I would read what the artist was trying to do.

It gives you another way of looking at it. In some cases, in most cases, when you look at something you don't understand, and you're not connecting with it, you read the artist's statement, and it gives you this insight that you didn't have before. Many times, all of a sudden, it would click, and I would totally get it. That's a tip that I would advise any gallery goer to do.

Alison Stewart: John, thank you so much for calling in. You, Bianca, in your book, Get the Picture, you get into art speak.

Bianca Bosker: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What were some of the favorite words that you learned, and also ones that you think, "That seems a little ridiculous," as someone who you're a professional writer, and then ones you thought, "Oh, well, that's an interesting way to use the language." I'd love to an example of each.

Bianca Bosker: I have to say that art speak, I do not share our caller's love for art speak. I respectfully disagree. Not that it can't be, of course, helpful to read, of course, an artist's statement. Art speak evolved, and this will not shock-- I should say, if you aren't familiar with art speak, art speak is essentially that overly complex way of talking where the bigger the word, the better. What an art critic calls indexical marks of the artist's body would be finger painting to you and me.

Art speak, this emerged arguably not, well, I should say, you probably know this if you've ever heard it, emerged not necessarily to be a clear form of communication. There was a study of art press releases that found that the words spatial and non-spatial get used interchangeably, but rather to be this exclusionary code, arguably, that distinguishes people that do or do not get it. I think that art speak puts up a boundary for people and, I think, especially in institutions where--

When I was at the Guggenheim, we had people from all over the world coming. I had hours to analyze some of these wall labels, and I still struggle to understand. They feel like the world's hardest reading comprehension test. I would say, indexicality, spatial, non-spatial, those are words that make me itch. One that I am trying to find my way to is mark-making. I worked at a gallery, and I had many conversations there when I was writing the press releases over the merits or not of mark-making. I want to believe it has merits, but I still haven't personally used that word myself.

Alison Stewart: This says, "I'm a working artist in New York City," this text, "worked in the food chain as an artist assistant for several years. My female co-worker and myself, also a woman, were let go because the male artist was closing the studio. A month later, he hired two male assistants. We work as independent contractors doing essentially long-term, full-time work, so we had no agency or legal standing." You had a similar experience where your internship turned into a 24/7 on-call, be here, paint walls, follow me around situation.

Bianca Bosker: Yes. Absolutely. I think that there's this just expectation of a blurring of the boundaries between business and pleasure. I think that for artists, there's this expectation that you will-- it's like you socialize where you work. In some cases, I spoke to someone who was in a very abusive gallery position where she essentially lived where she worked, she worked where she socialized, she socialized where she lived. She was living out of the gallery. I'm not surprised to hear this person's story, but I am dismayed to hear it.

You asked before about what is it that the art world doesn't want you to know. I think there are many things, but I think I came out of this experience feeling like we need to spend maybe less time with masterpieces and more time with the undiscovered and surprising artworks. We need to go to the galleries and people's garages and art schools and basements and homes. I really set out to get into this role because I wanted to understand all the decisions that get made that takes work from being the germ of an idea in an artist's studio to something that we ooh and ah over in a museum because those decisions shape us, they shape our idea of art and who makes it, and why we should bother to engage.

I think what I discovered along the way is just all the flaws in the machine. Just as an example, I worked with someone whose go-to question when deciding whether to give an artist a show was, is this someone I would want to hang out with? I think that when we go and see these works in museums, it's important to keep in mind these aren't necessarily the best. When I was working at the Guggenheim, there was a piece that was, as someone put it, rather unanimous, just arbitrarily put in because the director insisted it went in. Forced was the word that was used.

I think it is important when we go to these places to keep in mind that just because these objects are in a beautiful spotless white room, there's no substitute for your own eye, for your own judgment. That begins with long looking, with adventurous looking, and going beyond the traditional hierarchies and canons. Corrupt things happen.

Alison Stewart: Why were you surprised that it had flaws?

Bianca Bosker: I wasn't surprised that it had flaws, but I think that it's one thing to know that something has flaws. It's another thing to really understand at each point what those look like and how they get baked into the machine. Perhaps I was naive, but I had this faith in these museums, these responsible stewards of culture, of the best that culture had to offer. They are responsible stewards of culture, but it may not be the best. These are things that a lot of people could agree on.

They are the products of decisions by people who are biased and flawed, just like the rest of us. I think that knowing and being able to see that for yourselves, I think, I find that it helps me. I think that developing my eye meant seeing the work differently, but also seeing the world around it differently. As an example, I mean, when I was working selling art in Miami, that there was a curator who brought a group of collectors around.

A collector then came by later and announced that they were buying two versions of the exact same photograph, one to be shipped directly to the museum and one to be shipped directly to her home, which is a little philanthropy, a little polite corruption in the sense that when a work goes to a museum the value almost automatically increases.

Alison Stewart: My guess is Bianca Bosker. The name of the book is Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. We have a whole bunch of calls lined up as well as some texts, and Bianca will read a little bit from her book about her studio visits after a quick break.

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You are listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Bianca Bosker. The name of her book is, Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. Bianca is speaking tomorrow at Rizzoli Bookstore at 6:00 PM. The book is all about how she embedded herself in the New York City art scene. Let's take some calls. Let's talk to Mark from Brooklyn. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hello. How you doing?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Mark: I am a practicing artist and been in the art world for a few decades. I left the gallery. I had a gallery, and I left the gallery. Part of the reason, part of my motivation was just in you guys talking about vocabulary. I'm also a commercial director. There's a whole set of vocabulary there too, and it was fascinating to watch some of my friends who did better and made it start to use some of the more commercial vocabulary in the way they were describing their practice or their motivations or their successes.

It dawned on me, we as artists ostensibly do this. We love it, it's compulsion, it's this thing we have to do, but as you mature in this industry, you realize it's an industry. It is. It's a commercial practice, even though it's something that's so impassioned. That's always going to be weird and always going to be at odds, and it's uncomfortable. Then one other sidebar real quick. I've watched gallerists call other gallerists and say, "Hey, I'm moving a whatever. I'm moving a Joseph Carroll today." There's like 50 of them. In any other world, that's insider trading, you go to jail, and in the art world, that's like a Tuesday.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling in, Mark. This is a text, "I describe art speak using $50 words when $5 words will do, and I have degrees in both fine arts and art history. I find it to be exhausting and alienating." Then this text gets to something that you write about in your book, Bianca. Someone texted, "I worked at Sotheby's right out of college in the '80s. Salaries were ridiculously low, yet whenever my colleagues had gatherings at their homes, the apartments were extremely elegant and expensive at exclusive addresses. I couldn't figure out how they managed to live like that until someone explained to me that everyone who worked there was on trust funds. That's when I became aware of how lower classes were kept out of decision-making involved in what made art valuable."

Bianca Bosker: Yes. Someone described this to me as magic money, money that you don't know where it comes from, but it works magic. [laughs] Someone else described running galleries as a princess business, where it helps to come from inherited wealth. It's not to say that that's everyone's case, certainly, but I think there is this idea of being pure in the art world. That's this idea where the pure treat money like diarrhea. It's like a fact of life, but gross. If you get it, you don't talk about it.

The pure also there's a spectrum where there's "couch art" on one end of the spectrum, which is a synonym with colorful painting. On the other end of it, there is FU art, which is the work that doesn't play nicely at a dinner party. The pure tend to gravitate towards the FU art, which is market unfriendly, which is art speak for hard to sell, but I think that these are often galleries that get a lot of celebration, but let's not also forget that there's often magic money involved. These works can be very hard to sell, and so in some regards, being pure is a luxury, and it's a privilege in its own right. This idea of the distaste for money is itself a bit of a luxury.

Alison Stewart: You do write in the book about visiting artist studios. I would love for you to read this passage because you get a real sense of how some people who just really believe in their art and are really passionate about it, how they have to go about making it and what kind of circumstances they find themselves in. Would you mind reading from 57 to 58?

Bianca Bosker: Yes, I'd love to. As the fall got underway, I spent more and more time meeting artists for studio visits one-on-one in the hopes of mining our conversations for tips on understanding and appreciating art. Names unlocked access, and it became easier to convince people to speak with me once I could drop that so-and-so had met with me already. I gravitated toward up-and-coming artists at the vanguard of the new.

I met them at night or on weekends before or after their shifts as nannies, teachers, farmers, servers, bartenders, caterers, art handlers, web designers, construction workers, yoga instructors, photo retouchers, jewelry makers, gallery assistants, figure drawing models, backdrop painters, crafters of Mongolian horse hair tassels, and studio assistants, to more established artists. I went all over Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx to Warrens of Rooms above autobody shops and metal yards.

Studios were on long hallways set with wrap traps inside buildings that fluttered with ads for saw sharpening, therapy for creatives, and the chance to rent the corner of a subdivided studio already being split between a group of artists. A space slightly roomier than a Starbucks bathroom could be yours for $435 a month. Mysterious liquids dripped from the ceilings onto my notebook, and the dominant studio aesthetic was no one can hear you scream.

Room windows were an expensive and thus rare commodity, but any space at all was a luxury. A studio could be the extra square footage of a bedroom revealed by tipping the mattress against the wall, or the 24 square inches of floor space between a bookshelf bed and closet door. To save room, painters painted over finished paintings downsized to printer paper sized canvases or abandoned painting for video art, which they could more efficiently store on a hard drive.

When I asked artists about their wildest hopes and dreams for the future, they didn't talk about seeing their names on banners outside the Met or getting into subsequent additions of Janson's History of Art. They talked about affording healthcare, and if really pushed a pipe dream, one painter called it, making enough money from selling their art to do it full time.

Alison Stewart: That's Bianca Bosker reading her book, Get the Picture. How did those studio visits change the way you see art? How did it help you in developing your eye?

Bianca Bosker: Drastically. I had this goal. When I started talking with artists, they quickly became clear that they pitied me. I lacked visual literacy, which they said was downright dangerous in a world so saturated with images, and really encouraged me to develop my eye, which is not just an organ, but in this context, this painstakingly cultivated outlook that allegedly enables you to see a lot that doesn't meet the uninitiated eye. Who will be the next Picasso, or what's transcendent about a sculpture of limp vegetables on a stained mattress?

As I got into working with artists, but of course also working at museums and galleries, it was really this transformation in the way that I saw art, but also the way I saw the world. I think that we often think of art as a luxury. It can't feed us, clothe us, or be used to kill predators, but artists and scientists are right there together and announcing it really a fundamental part of our humanity. As one biologist put it, as necessary to us as food or sex.

I think one of the things that it changed for me goes back to how we generally see. I didn't realize this, but vision is really a hallucination. We do not see the world like video cameras, dispassionately recording the scenes around us. Our brains are trash compactors, and we have these filters of expectation that preemptively sort, dismiss, ignore the raw data coming in even before we get the full picture. Art that helps us fight these reducing tendencies of our minds.

Artists know that, but scientists have come to that conclusion as well. They argue that essentially art introduces a glitch into our brains. A glitch that is a gift, a glitch that helps our brains jump the curb. I think that, for me, being around artists helped me see art everywhere. Helped me not only get more out of the artwork I did see, but some of my favorite parts of going to a museum or a gallery these days are when I step outside and I begin to see art everywhere.

I see it in the Mr. Softy trucks. I see it in the glow of a brick wall that I would have totally ignored months before, but all of a sudden, instead of just being red, it's this alive with purples and blues, and it's surprising and beautiful. I hate to admit this, but there is a wall on East 81st Street that has made me tear up with its sheer beauty of its color. I do believe that there is an artist in each of us to the extent that we fight to keep our brains from compressing our experience of the world. Art is a decision. It is a fight against complacency. It's a choice to forge a life that's more interesting, more complex, and ultimately more beautiful.

Alison Stewart: Let's try to get one or two more calls in from artists. Charles is an artist calling in from the Upper West Side. Hi, Charles?

Charles: Thank you so much, and thanks for your guest. By the way, I wanted to say this, you are truly an artist as a writer because by going through all those studios, you saw the finished page. When you write a page, and it's finished, and when a page reads like a letter, that's a piece of artwork. I'm an artist. I learned how to [unintelligible 00:30:54] a total space for one of my teachers that gave me three pages in front of me. He said, "Touch all corners of the page." He'd always pull up the middle page because to get the other two pages the other side, I had to go to the middle page, and that became the finished drawing.

Then he was a very good artist. He was with Allan Stone Gallery, who was probably one of the best galleries in New York City as long as it lasted because they made Wayne Thiebaud. When I met the gallery owner, Allan Stone, he liked one of my drawings and said that if I made them all like this, he would sell them. His assistant, her name was Joan Wolf, she was unique. When I would bring her work in to ask her to critique, she would say it's not carved out enough, it's not finished.

She'd just tell me to go home and carve it out. I think, from your experiences, you were able to carve out your writing as a journalist. Sometimes when I visit, and I shoot pictures, Richard Serra [unintelligible 00:31:54] has bought my photos because I like shooting his work when he is moving it around with the cranes and everything. For years, I drew the insides of St. John's Cathedral. I started the stone collection and the stone yard. Then one year I drew the Garden Court in the Frick. I wanted to get physical with the buildings that I was drawing because when you get a total space, you can draw like an architect and make them.

Alison Stewart: Charles, I'm going to jump in because we're running up against a hard out. Thank you for calling in, and thank you for holding, and thank you for all your kind words for our guest. Last quick question. We've got about one minute. Why is New York the art capital?

Bianca Bosker: [laughs] It's got everything. It's got all parts of the food chain.

Alison Stewart: Well done on that wrap. Well done. My guest has been Bianca Bosker. The name of the book is Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. You can hear more from Bianca tomorrow at Rizzoli Bookstore at 6:00 PM. Thank you for coming into the studio.

Bianca Bosker: Thank you so much for having me.

 

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