Bianca Bosker

I’d gotten obsessed with understanding why art matters, if it does, and whether quality time with a few smears of colored rock on stretched cloth—a “painting” as it’s more commonly known—can really transform our existence.

. The earliest known painting keeps getting older, but the last time I checked, archaeologists had traced the oldest portrait to a cave in Indonesia where, around 45,500 years ago, artists put their finishing touches on a fat figure with purple testicles for a chin. In other words, before Neanderthals went extinct, before mammoths died out, before we figured out how to harvest food or heal bloody wounds, humans applied themselves to painting the portrait of a warty pig. “It is clear that the creation of beautiful and symbolic objects is a characteristic feature of the human way of life,” wrote the biologist J. Z. Young.

The people I was meeting worshipped the idea of an “Eye,” by which they didn’t mean the organ, but a painstakingly cultivated outlook that allegedly enables you to see lots that doesn’t meet the eye, like who’ll be the next Picasso or what’s transcendent about a middle-aged man climbing up a ladder to lecture about burnt pubes.

I learned that art museums evolved out of aristocrats’ palaces and that Piero Manzoni canned his own shit for a sculpture. But what I didn’t learn was why. Why bother with art? Everything I read started from the assumption that Art Was Important, and if I didn’t know why, too bad. “One of the best things about art is that it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone,” said one art critic dismissively in an article that maintained the problem with art isn’t that it’s too elitist but that it’s not elitist enough.

But I found the fear, the reticence, the cageyness that seemed to pervade the art world bizarre. And tantalizing. Artists broke out in hives if you asked them to explain their work. Gallerists hid the prices, then refused to sell you a piece, even if you could pay for it. Curators turned a sickly green when you mentioned the words “general public,” and critics often wrote about the art in code. (“Indexical marks of the artist’s body” would be “finger painting” to you and me.) What happened to art being a “characteristic feature of the human way of life”? Why keep people out? Why keep me out?

To get at the truth about art, I also needed to understand the art world—the throbbing jumble of genius, money, and love that the artists I spoke with nicknamed “the machine.”

For the next four hours, I scribbled in my notebook while Jack rattled off facts and survival tips. Installation art was harder to sell than photography, which was harder to sell than painting, and abstract painting (which doesn’t aim to depict the real world) could be harder to sell than figurative painting (which, like “representational painting,” does aim to depict something real). Galleries typically split each sale fifty-fifty with the artist, which still didn’t come out to enough that Jack could work at his gallery full time. Like a lot of young gallerists, he juggled a classifieds’ section worth of side jobs—hanging other galleries’ ex

hibits, photographing their shows—and his gallery was only open from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m., a holdover from when, until recently, he’d had to jump on his bike and book it to the dinner shift at a South African restaurant nearby.

Everyone I met, including Jack, had offered the same pair of contradictory caveats: There are so many art worlds, and the art world is so small.

But I was baffled by how I’d ever come close to doing or feeling the same. Looking at the art was apparently a necessary but insufficient condition for “getting” it.