Title: Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See

Author: Bianca Bosker

Completed: June 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: About a year ago, I was asked to support high school art teachers at work. A few months ago, middle school art teachers were added as well. The trouble is my background in art is very limited. I enjoy welding pieces, but my art history knowledge and skill with a paintbrush are both severely lacking. While this book did not improve my painting or provide me with all the history of “The Art World,” it did show me there are many “art worlds” and that I’m not as far removed from some of them as it feels. Bianca also offers insight into how to better connect with art, find art that speaks to you, and incorporate art into our lives. After reading this, I feel better prepared to help all the art teachers in our district… until next year when I’m expected to support the Ag Science teachers, but that will require a different book.

Highlights:

• modernists were pushing white as the new neutral. But it was the Nazis who helped perfect what we now think of as the white cube. The Nazis’ first foray into architecture-as-propaganda was building none other than an art museum, which opened in 1937 with tall ceilings, spotless white walls, gleaming floors, sparsely hung art, and bright overhead lighting—a design ethos that failed artist Adolf Hitler praised as a brick-and-mortar manifestation of his quest for “cultural purification.” From then on, the look became so popular that, historian Charlotte Klonk observes, “one is almost tempted to speak of the white cube as a Nazi invention.”
• Jack had mentioned that he used to love the meticulous black-and-white photographs made by the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. Now, however, Jack considered them—kiss of death—“decorative.” His key criticism of the work: “It’s just very technically skilled.”
• In 1917, Duchamp blew minds when he took a porcelain urinal, turned it on its side, and declared it a sculpture. (He dubbed art made from existing things “readymades.”) Besides Fountain (the sculpture of the urinal), Duchamp made pieces such as Bottlerack (literally, a bottle rack) and In Advance of the Broken Arm (just a snow shovel, albeit one with a sense of humor). Duchamp believed art needed to evolve beyond the so-called “retinal art” he saw his peers making—paintings of reclining nudes and impressionistic water lilies that, Duchamp sniffed dismissively, were “pleasing” and “attractive” objects that tickled the eye without stimulating the mind. “I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products,” Duchamp wrote.
• You can stick a stroller in a garage and get a few mechanics to claim it’s a car, but that does not mean the stroller can do sixty miles an hour on the freeway. But put a urinal in a gallery and get critics to extol its artistic essence, and the urinal becomes a sculpture. There are many schools of thought on looking at art, including isolationists who will wave away context and tell you that anything beyond the artifact itself is irrelevant. But I didn’t know any isolationists. The mood in the room was that fine art was what influential insiders said it was, hence the importance of attaching the right names (the right context) to whatever you were doing.
• Barbara Guggenheim—whose last name is chiseled on museums around the world—in her book Art World. “Gallerists and collectors are quick to snap up quality artists, leaving few good ones, if any, languishing in obscurity.” So it’s pure coincidence, then, that the artists languishing in obscurity tend to be overwhelmingly women and people of color, while the “quality artists” in major American museums are 85 percent white and 87 percent male.
• Fumbling for words early on, I had occasionally—and very regrettably, I now saw—praised artists’ work as “beautiful.” Since then, I’d had it drilled into me that beautiful meant “decorative” and decorative meant “dumb,” and the only graver insult was “accessible,” which beautiful art was assumed to be.
• “Just walk up to a piece and try to think of five things that it brings up,” she suggested. Not five things that the art is about. The observations don’t need to be grandiose, like this probes masculinity in the postinternet age. Just, what are five things you notice, either in the work or in how it makes you feel. “Like, that red is very cool or very warm . . . That shape really dominates the canvas . . . I love how that paint is gushy and then it thins out,” Gina said, ticking through formal features. “All those things are important, and they’re intentional.” I thought of Julie wrestling with her blue sky. Painting is constant decision-making.
• beauty appears to be hardwired in our brains. “Beauty is one of the ways life perpetuates itself, and love of beauty is deeply rooted in our biology,” writes psychologist Nancy Etcoff in her book Survival of the Prettiest. Like the innate preference for sweetness that makes newborns smile when they drink sugar water, scientists like Etcoff hypothesize that humans have evolved to find certain forms more attractive than others (a theory that undermines the idea, espoused by some, that what we find beautiful has been imposed on us by a corrupt cabal of Don Draper types). Exactly which visual features constitute the “aesthetic primitives” that humans innately consider beautiful is still being researched, but there are a few promising candidates. People across diverse cultures and age groups prefer curved shapes to angular ones—a preference that holds constant across things, rooms, patterns, and abstract shapes, as well as one we share with rats, chimps, and gorillas. Humans—like squirrels, crows, and capuchin monkeys—also prefer symmetrical designs to asymmetrical ones, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, we prefer colors (like blue) that we strongly associate with pleasant things (like clean water), while we dislike colors (like brown) that we strongly associate with things we avoid (like feces).
• Today we hail Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as art and dismiss a needlepoint pillow that says “NAP QUEEN” as lowly “craft”—certainly not the sort of thing we should stare at in museums, waiting to feel transformed. Yet the notion that fine art exists in a special category unto itself and moves us more deeply than mere stuff is actually a recent invention, one that’s newer and more European than the cuckoo clock.
• ancient Greece and Rome. “Art” meant any activity requiring human ingenuity and skill. Training horses, painting vases, passing laws, writing poems, singing songs, sewing clothes, blowing glass: art, art, and more art. While in ancient Egypt the “chief sculptors” who worked on royal tombs enjoyed a privileged status, among the ancient Greeks and Romans, painters and sculptors got lumped in with farmers, cobblers, and other manual workers who did physical labor for a fee—“suppliers of a commodity on par with shoemakers,” writes one archaeologist, describing Greek artists circa the fifth century BCE.
• One survival-of-the-most-artistic hypothesis contends that art is our version of peacock feathers: An extravagant, frivolous display by which paleolithic humans showed potential mates that they were fit enough to hunt and gather and have time leftover to paint warty pigs. Another theory is that our art-inclined ancestors survived, thrived, and reproduced because making art offered a dress rehearsal for grappling with hostile conditions.
• The scholar Ellen Dissanayake, who’s dabbled in anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and art history, argues that art is a social glue that bonds communities together and thus increases its members’ odds of survival. Also, she thinks the concept of “fine art” is a travesty that’s made us forget that “engaging with the arts is as universal, normal, and obvious in human behavior as sex or parenting.”
• [Ellen Dissanayake] is for banning the word art altogether on the grounds it’s uselessly vague, and argues we shouldn’t treat art as a thing but as a behavior. Art, she claims, occurs anytime we take ordinary things and transform them into extraordinary experiences through a process she calls “making special.” Making special happens when words turn into poetry, flesh gets painted for a shaman’s ceremony, a B-flat meets a middle G to form the tune in a Peking opera.
• what if taste was simply an idea to be interrogated? I liked the idea that “good” taste could just mean having tastes that were unpredictable and flexible
• And here’s the thing: According to the latest theories, our brains are not faithful translators of those impoverished light signals hitting our retinas. The incoming visual data passes through what Rebecca calls a “filter of expectation” in which our brains preemptively dismiss, ignore, sort, classify, and prioritize the raw data even before we get the full picture.
• Our perception of the world is only a prediction—a hallucination, you might say, shaped by our filters of expectation. And art, Wagemans contends, deliberately messes with those predictions. Artists create images that introduce incongruities, such as a plate of sushi made with eyes instead of fish. Artists defy our expectations, such as by sticking a pearl-clad woman in wrestling helmet inside a padded room. Artists introduce “unfamiliar experiences in an otherwise completely familiar setting,”
• The glitch that art introduces our brains to is a gift, one that may nudge us to adjust our filters of expectation
• Our brains evolved into engines for compressing reality and turning it into a trickle. We had to conserve our mental energy so we could spot the predator jumping out of the bushes to eat us. But what happens when we evolve beyond being prey? I’d come to think our brains needed help transforming from trash compactors into microscopes, and that’s where art comes in: a way to fight our instincts to truncate and elide, and, in so doing, to notice more, appreciate more, empathize more. Which is all to say, to experience more. If our lives are the set of experiences that we collect, then art can enable us to literally live more in the same amount of time by uncompressing those experiences. Art is practice for appreciating life,
• Studies by Braverman and others found that after going through this art-based visual literacy course, medical students who then examined a patient observed more, offered more sophisticated descriptions of what they saw, were better at reading human facial expressions, and tended to make fewer mistakes than did control groups who, say, went to an anatomy lecture or sat through a tutorial on physically examining a patient. NYPD detectives, FBI agents, and Navy SEALs have all since made their own treks to museums to relearn looking by spending time with paintings.
• Putting art on your walls wasn’t the same as decorating. Buying art also meant helping artists thrive and enlivening your hours on this planet by surrounding yourself with objects that could tweak your humanity.
• The big galleries supported a winner-take-all model and the fantasy that talent was in short supply. But you could buy a print for $150 at Denny Dimin or spend $10 and get a small sculpture of candy from Spring/Break, where the work jarred loose my filter of expectation more than did anything I saw at the week’s more prestigious fairs. You could take chances for prices like that. You could back a different way of seeing the world—and potentially change your own while you’re at it. Or you could spend nothing: My conversations with artists and gallerists left me with the sense that you could support art just by seeing it and letting it work its magic on you.
• Beauty, I’d come to think, doesn’t have to have a physical form, and it certainly doesn’t have to be something we agree on. Beauty is that moment your mind jumps the curb. Beauty is the instant you sit up and start paying attention. Whatever makes that happen for you can be beautiful. Math equations. Gymnastics. Planes landing. But you have to be open to seeing it. Beauty doesn’t find you. You create beauty by looking for it, and the moment you do find it, stop and pay attention. Beauty is infinite, if you decide it can be, but you may never see it the same way twice.