Volunteering to have your face sat on in public is all it takes to earn my respect. Apparently, anyway. The act of being smothered by a highly sought-after “ass influencer” at a gallery performance was the exact moment when I had to hand it to writer Bianca Bosker: she has dedication. In her art world odyssey Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See, recently published by Viking Press, Bosker recalls, with some residual bafflement, agreeing to be publicly plopped on at artist/influencer Mandy allFIRE’s “live face-sitting event” in the depths of Haul Gallery’s basement Brooklyn space. What makes Bosker’s impulsive enthusiasm so admirable is not only her sudden willingness but her sincere analysis of face-sitting as art. Rather than recoiling in horror or writhing in respiratory distress, she considers the experience during the smooshing:

“Mandy was back to reading fans’ messages (‘I want to smell your farts’), and it dawned on me that I could feel Mandy laughing before she laughed, could sense my forehead trembling before my ears heard the ha ha. It was primal. It was like being in the deepest pit of a hug. Or a cave.”

Embraced by the buttcheek hug, Bosker was one of the few actual participants in this performance—all those hundreds of thousands of slobbering social media ass fanatics cowered behind their screens, too intimidated to fulfill their fantasies in person. Cowards. They missed out on these kinds of revelations: “Was this like being in the womb? A reverse womb? Something about being born again?”

It surely was a rebirth for Bianca! At least in my opinion of her book. I’ll admit, I was prepared to hate Get The Picture, a curious jaunt through the highs (infectious aesthetic passions) and mostly lows (paranoia, social climbing, status obsession, money laundering, jealousy, insider trading, rampant personality disorders…) of the New York art world from an outsider in an attempt to understand what is so captivating about art. Not only hate but loathe. This was for a few reasons, not the least of which was Bosker’s method for infiltrating the typically exclusive art world in an attempt to learn how to appreciate art as much as her grandmother who taught art to children while in a displaced-persons camp in Austria during World War II. She did so by taking on normally low-paying art jobs: a gallery intern with Jack Barrett (then running 315 Gallery), an assistant with Denny Dimin Gallery, a studio assistant with artist Julie Curtiss (who got a lot of free PR from this book), and a security guard with the Guggenheim. While this participatory approach works to give the reader a more hands-on perspective and forges a sharp distinction from the other similarly journalistic art world books like Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World, I felt a rush of physical anger every time I read about it. Much of this had to do with how the press framed Get the Picture as if Bosker was a seasoned secret agent with headlines blaring that Bosker “went undercover” or “felt like an FBI agent.” This was made even more absurd when I read the book as I don’t think CIA agents tell people their assignments, unlike Bosker who was always clear about her journalistic pursuits. Mostly, though, it felt offensive for those who have suffered through these miserable jobs to scrape together rent rather than whimsically trying to find their own artistic eye for a book released by a prestigious publisher.

Including me. My culture of shitty jobs is not your costume! Some of this may also boil down to some personal jealousy as for years I’ve toyed with writing a satirical novel about the art world from the view of a gallery assistant, mostly using my own unhappy gallerina experiences as fodder. I even have about 150 pages of a manuscript, but I keep quitting as delving too deep into the art world gives me hives. Plus, the gallery owner who fired me long ago was murdered in January, found stabbed 18 times in Brazil. That…mmm…changes some things, including what section of a bookstore this book would even be in!

The other issue is more superficial yet not much less irritating: the horrendous cover art. The chosen photo is a series of variously colored paint globs with a lone brush jutting into the frame towards the middle; these splotches surround an amateurish painted title. The image resembles an ad for a children’s community center art course or art therapy (trust me–I look for stock photos as a copywriter for a therapy practice and these are the kinds of images I skip). This cover has nothing resembling the snobbish end of art in which Bosker dabbles. Is this cover purposefully bad? Is it subtly mocking those of us shuddering in aesthetic revulsion—that we, too, are art snoots? Or is it just evidence that Viking Press didn’t want to spend more than a credit on iStock? No matter the motivation, I hate it and I hope this crime against vision is rectified before the release of the paperback edition.

I’m not going to say I was wrong about either of these judgments. Yet Get the Picture is a far more entertaining read than I assumed. Particularly as someone who has navigated and purposefully attempted to distance myself as much as possible from the inner workings of the art world, I can attest that Bosker is not only observant but largely nails the more insidious qualities of the industry, namely those that prevent outsiders (or even insiders) from enjoying art such as impenetrable art-speak and cliquish behavior. There’s a rush of relief when she pinpoints an aspect of the insular world—like thank god! Someone else sees it too! Take, for instance, the obsessive competitiveness between artists as evidenced by a rash of nasty comments to Julie Curtiss during the art auction-flipping of the late 2010s:

“The bullies on Instagram espoused a view of the art world I recognized all too well from my time at galleries: that contemporary art is a zero-sum game, where opportunities are finite because attention is finite because the audience for art is finite. (And if anything, should be smaller—kick out the Schmos, who are only dumbing down culture, anyhow). If figuration was in, then abstraction was out. If one artist was succeeding, then another must be failing.”

Tell me that isn’t true. This is not to say all her observations are accurate. In particular, one strange quirk that needled at me throughout the entire book is lodged within that quote. Busker has a habit of referring to terms she was told higher-ups in the art world use to describe regular people vs. insiders: the Schmos vs. the Heads. Readers, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I truly don’t believe anyone has ever used these terms. If they have, we need to know their names, which Bosker doesn’t provide.

To be fair, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that these terms were uttered by gallerist Jack Barrett who emerges in the book as such an absurd douchebag that I’ll never be able to take him or his gallery seriously ever again. So much so that I have “asshole” written in the margins on a page related to Barrett. What started as Bosker’s first art opportunity became a toxic relationship as Barrett picked on her clothes (“It’s like—maybe you should change your wardrobe”), gasped when she wasn’t familiar with object-oriented ontology (“If you don’t know about object-oriented ontology, I’m not sure you can have a conversation about contemporary art”), bitched about her wall painting abilities (“This is like dog shit smeared on the wall”), and complained about her uncoolness rubbing off on him (“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”). Oh yeah, he also obsessively surveils her other investigative outreach lest that reputation rub off on him. Barrett’s assholism doesn’t just stop with his relationship with Busker. Imagine gallery-hopping with THIS guy:

“‘I don’t like this color, it’s muddy,’ he whispered, as he examined the purply walls at the Toyin Ojih Odutola show across the street. He pronounced another gallery’s lighting ‘harsh,’ fingered a scrape on someone else’s wall, and frowned at a poorly extracted nail.”

He sounds fun.

More than just mocking Jack Barrett, the juicy gossip contained within Get the Picture is primarily what kept me turning those pages. Tidbits like this psychotic Denny Dimin Gallery collector:

“The man had taken time out of his day to travel to the Lower East Side so he could scream at Rob for liking—not posting, liking—a meme on Instagram that, the Serious Collector blustered, kinda sorta vaguely poked fun at an organization he supported. Rob paled and stammered out an apology. The collector’s wife and kid piled on with more outrage. Delete that, the collector commanded. He peered over Rob’s shoulder as Rob unliked the post, supervising Rob’s iPhone to verify his will was done.”

Totally normal and professional behavior!

Throughout Get the Picture, it’s hard not to conclude that the denizens of the commercial New York art world should probably all be locked up in a padded room someplace away from the general population. It’s no surprise, then, that Busker came to truly appreciate art the farther away she got from the commercial side of things whether in Julie Curtiss’s studio or, even more so, at the Guggenheim. Staring at works for hours at a time, she could take in art for the actual artwork’s sake, not its “context” like what MFA program the artist attended or the social status of those who collected their work. A one-sided relationship with a Brancusi sculpture is really what solidified an authentic love for art. She writes, “… there was a feeling I recognized from being in love: that I could be around these pieces for as far as I could see into the future and I wouldn’t get sick of their company.”

This is quite sweet and Busker’s increasing comfort with the visual is also observable in the writing itself. Early on, Busker employs some of the most baffling comparisons I’ve ever read. For example, on Mondrian: “…as if Excel docs had gotten gussied up in red, yellow, and blue formal wear.” On Jack Barrett’s wardrobe: “…his look reminded me of a toddler dressed for a moon landing.” And my favorite, on gallery openings: “Pretension hung in the air like an unacknowledged fart…” Classy! Regretfully, I had to agree with the cunt who told Busker she “lacked ‘visual literacy.’” Interestingly (and a bit disappointingly), though, this bizarre writing style disappears as the book progresses. As Busker gets more confident in her own eye, she also becomes more comfortable with writing about art and the visual.

Busker’s developing and doggedly pursued passion for art, especially her advocacy for others to find small off-the-beaten-path art spaces in the book’s conclusion, is a moving personal transformation. Yet I wonder how engaging it is for people who have, like Busker, little to no prior experience with the art world. You know, the Schmos, as she would say. Are people just chomping at the bit to read about Art Basel Miami Beach? Or curating exhibitions in Hong Kong? Or wandering around Spring/Break with the collectors known as the Icy Gays? Or what bullshit Jack Barrett is slinging? Get the Picture feels ironically quite insidery to me. Which is why I’m drawn to Busker’s enthusiasm for Mandy allFIRE’s face-sitting performance. That’s an artistic gesture with a certain, well, filthy purity that just about everyone can appreciate.