Starting from the question : “Why does art matter ?” Bianca Bosker dives into the world of contemporary art with all her soul. First, she gets a job as an assistant in an art gallery, where she is treated with contempt, before working in another gallery with two “kind of normal” gallerists. She then assists several artists, either by stretching canvases or by dealing with administrative work. Finally, she takes a job as a museum security guard, where she stares at the same art pieces for hours. She questions, challenges, tries to understand why art is so important and prays to get “The Eye,” a superpower that is blurry and hard to define. This is a really deep and detailed look at art, both its flaws and its amazing impact on our lives.
“I’d grown suspicious of beauty over the last few months. It had become increasingly clear to me that polite society (including but not limited to the art scene) considered beauty to be toxic and that seeking it out – by wearing mascara, splurging on flowers, or hanging a pretty picture of waves over your couch – was a sign of moral weakness. Philosophers, art critics, scientists, and your garden-variety intellectuals have, over the past hundred years, teamed up with artists to declare beauty both corrupted and corrupting. It’s “superficial and consoling,” “tainted by bourgeois values,” and “manipulated by those in power,” writes professor Rhett Diessner in his book on beauty – where, on page one, he feels compelled to reassure readers that beauty really is important to think about. “Today,” he writes, “it is simply treated by the art world as a joke, a con, an idiotic, old-fashioned idea.” I worried that enjoying a beautiful artwork meant I wasn’t really moved, the way Jack was by Michael Blake’s bathroom sculpture.”