Learning the art lingo: the people, periods and -isms

When she first starts working as a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Bianca Bosker is so bored that she prays someone will touch the art. ‘Do it, I urged silently from my spot by the wall. Do it so I can tell you not to.’ She’s to stand for hours on end, staring into space, reporting anything that could pose a threat. On the first day she radios her supervisors to alert them to a stray leaf: ‘Not exactly a suspicious package, but I needed something to interrupt the tedium.’

The job is one of several Bosker picks up in her quest to understand why art matters. An aspiring artist turned journalist, she’d hoped to become ‘an art appreciator, if not an art maker’ until she moved to New York and swiftly became overwhelmed by everything she didn’t know – ‘the people, the periods, the -isms’. She felt so uninformed and out of place that she considered giving up going to galleries altogether; only she couldn’t shake the sense that she was missing out, because of the obsessive devotion the art she was seeing inspired in others. ‘It was thrilling. Or maybe it was bullshit? Either way, my life looked drained of colour by comparison.’ So, she set out to discover the truth by handing herself over to artists, gallerists, curators, collectors – the experts and the fanatics.

Wheedling your way into a self-contained world about which you know next to nothing is no mean feat, but Bosker has past experience. Just as Get the Picture takes readers inside ‘the throbbing jumble of genius, money, and love’ that is the contemporary art world, her Cork Dork (2017) popped the cork on the sommelier industry and wine snobs.