Bosker, Bianca. Get The Picture. Viking, New York, 2024. NF; 7/24.

Bosker is a now best-selling journalist whose recent success Cork Dorks described her exploration of wine (which I’m a bit familiar with). Here she does another exploration, this time of art, graphic or visual (which I know next to nothing about). There are similarities including the detail and highly subjective self-immersion in an unfamiliar world (art or wine) and what she finds out is similar too: it’s the experience that matters, and it’s at its best if you can somehow manage to pay informed attention. A wacky sense of humour and convincing description of her experiences rescue her story from being precious or tutorial. I liked it.

I was interested to see what this author would find, writing a quarter-century after Jacques Barzun’s huge description of cultural history including art concluded that nothing of any value has been produced since World War I. “Modern” and subsequent art, famously announced in 1917 by Duchamp’s “fountain” (a urinal), seemed to have deteriorated into a circus of nihilism and jokes by the end of the 20^th century. Bosker now sends a positive if subjective message that contemporary art may be able to make a difference to people.

Bosker’s journey starts when she connects with a New York gallery owner named Jack. He acquaints her with what he calls “context” in art, which is a hierarchical social exclusivity. Who else has bought her? Where did she study? Where has she been exhibited? Membership in a presumed clerisy wouldn’t have much to do with the art objects themselves. Jack says, “I hate to break it to you … but you’re not the coolest cat in the art world, so having you around, is like—it’s just, like, lowering my coolness.” Eventually although she learns a lot from this guy they part company. Bosker concludes that she needs to have “an eye” for art but she’s not sure what that is or how to get it.

Next, she connects and works with Elizabeth Denny and Rob Dimin who together have a struggling but successful art gallery and dealership. Here Bosker learns about the commercial side of art, attending with them a huge exhibition in Miami where thousands of art objects are exhibited and sold, or not. The business is risky financially and both principals work long hard hours. Our author is beginning to develop her eye but is still seeking a definition of “good” art beyond what hangs in museums and how much it costs.

Through the association with Elizabeth and Rob Bosker becomes an assistant to a developing artist Julie Curtiss. Although I don’t think we know who “Jack” was exactly, Elizabeth, Rob, and Julie are real in the New York art world, and Julie’s reputation and stature are well-established. You can look up some of Julie’s work online and although to me definitely weird it looked pictorial and finely-crafted so I could spend some time looking at and thinking about it. Julie is extremely candid about her work and the experience of art appreciation.

Fresh experiences can lead to new tastes and a life that feels longer, Julie contended. Remember when you were little and an hour-long car ride felt like a lifetime? “I think it’s because, truly, everything’s new. When you experience new things, time slows down a little bit,” she told me. “When you go on trips—which is my favorite thing to do—everything is new, and you feel so young again. And reinvigorated with new ideas, new perspectives, a new understanding of yourself.”

Especially as we get older, we relax into the warm bath of our preferences and then stay there, even as the water cools and our fingers turn pruney. Tastes become our identity, and the idea of changing them feels like an existential threat.

The experience of art changes us but like the psychiatrist’s lightbulb we have to want to be changed. Bosker concludes among other transformational ideas it’s “probably more honest to keep asking questions of yourself than to lay claim to the right answer” about good art.

Trying to get to the bottom of the experience of art (as she did about the difference between experts and casual drinkers with wine) Bosker attends a conference where neurologists and other scientists discuss their understanding of the art experience. She is struck by what some of them say. “Most people think they don’t miss anything, that they see what is,” (says one physicist) ”they don’t realize: They see what they hallucinate.” And perception of course is evolved: “The goal of vision is not to get things perfectly right all the time,” says another neuroscientist, “but to get it right often enough and quickly enough to survive as long as possible to leave behind as many babies as you can.”

A fuller understanding of art is developing for Bosker and what she is learning and experiencing is not confined to paintings and sculpture. There is a kind of waking up from what we are used to.

“You take away the filter of expectation and you allow the world to be this chaotic stream of information.” (She was told) And here it was. The mess of colors, the long gazes at the door: Julie, I thought, was pulling away her filter of expectation so she could capture the full glory of (a colour on one of her paintings) “gray.”

Finally, Bosker spends some time as a guide and guard at New York’s Guggenheim Museum which she says (accurately, I’ve visited it) on the inside “feels like the world’s most transcendent parking-garage exit ramp.” She refines her focus on works of art:

There is an artist in each of us to the extent that we struggle to keep our brains from compressing our experience. Art is a choice. It is a fight against complacency. It is a decision to forge a life that’s richer, more uncomfortable, more mind-blowing, more uncertain. And ultimately, more beautiful.

I was cheered a bit that somebody at least willing to spend several years in, and write a book about, art and art appreciation didn’t feel as pessimistic as Jacques Barzun. For sure he was enormously better informed than Bosker but he died shortly after he published his book in 2000 and there’s a bit of water under the bridge since then. It just may be in the intervening 25 years or so something new and potentially exciting is happening in the art world. I would say if it were true it would be long overdue and very welcome.

I haven’t done justice here to Bosker’s funny side and her instinct for narrative. Like the book on wine this isn’t at all a hands-off journalist’s look-see. She gets up to her eyeballs in the world she’s writing about. What’s next, I wonder? Healthcare? Finance? Cars?

I do think you can do a lot worse than follow this smart serious writer as she grows in understanding of a particular part of the world and of herself. I’m trying to look at paintings – and life – with a bit less preconception. It’s not easy.

8.9/9.2