Get the Picture

The Heads

An Introduction

To be fair, everyone warned me it was a bad idea. What I wanted to do was not only impossible but vaguely dangerous, they intimated. They didn't come right out and threaten my safety or anything. My reputation, well-being, and livelihood as a journalist-that, however, was another story.

It's not like I was trying to expose CIA spies or anything. I was dead set on infiltrating what turns out to be a nearly as paranoid group: the art world.

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.

And how better to find out, I figured, than by handing myself over to the culture fiends who live for art: Artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors. Up-and-coming gallery owners who max out their credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world. I wanted to study the fanatics who fly their art with them on vacation and see if I could feel fireworks when I looked at art-instead of, as was often my experience, the urge to holler at the artist to just tell us what you mean.

Except as practically everyone in the art world saw it, what I wanted-this is where the warnings came in-was to stick my nose where it didn't belong. "You'll make some powerful enemies," warned a seasoned art collector. "It's not worth it for you living in New York." Then an art dealer volunteered that he'd have no qualms trashing my reputation-personal, professional, and psychological-if I wrote anything he disagreed with. Nice career you've got there-be a shame if something happened to it.

IN RETROSPECT, I blame my grandmother's carrots. I'd never have gone poking around the art scene if it wasn't for them.

There I was: Early thirties, living in New York, with a nice career in journalism and a flawlessly optimized routine, albeit one that didn't make room for art. And yet once upon a time, art had been my thing. Growing up in Oregon, I was a sun-starved little weirdo who painted obsessively, showed art in local shows, and flirted with applying to art school. I had it all planned out: I'd move to New York to squat in an East Village loft with my painter-lover-muse, who'd feed me cigarettes for breakfast and poetry for lunch.

Then serious Bianca grabbed the wheel. In college I took econ-never art history-with an eye toward the kind of career that would come with a dental plan. I graduated with a vague hope that I'd become an art appreciator if not an art maker, which lasted until I moved to New York and actually started seeing art on a regular basis. Whoa, was I out of my league. My first trip to galleries in Chelsea left me with the distinct impression I'd wandered into a private party by mistake. Pretension hung in the air like an unacknowledged fart, and at each show, I felt two tattoos and a master's degree short of fitting in. I went to museums, which seemed friendlier, yet as I wandered through halls of oil-painted nobles and brooding marble statues, I felt overwhelmed by everything I didn't know-the people, the periods, the -isms. Whatever love of art I'd felt shriveled in comparison to the bewildering feeling that I was woefully uninformed and thus doing it wrong. As the years passed, my visits to art shows became dutiful, and I let friends drag me along while I fidgeted awkwardly in front of exhibits I didn't understand. Bit by bit, art and I became estranged. Eventually, we were no longer on speaking terms.

Then, a few years back, I was home in Oregon purging my mom's basement when I yanked open a drawer of yellowed papers and my breath snagged in surprise. There, with their delicate black commas for feet and green whirling-dervish stems, were my grandmother's dancing carrots.

My grandmother made a point of telling me the carrots' origin story whenever I visited. My grandmother-this is my dad's mom-was a twentysomething Jew in Warsaw when Hitler invaded Poland. By the time she was my age, she'd lost relatives to mass graves, narrowly avoided concentration camps, and been forced to labor in Soviet coal mines. She ended the war in a displaced-persons camp in Austria, where, though she was an economist with no children of her own and no artistic inclination that I know of, she started teaching art to the kids. Once, as a special occasion, she helped them organize a dance show, scrimping paper to make costumes, which had to be cheery but politically innocuous: She rejected apples (red could suggest Soviet sympathies) and birds (which could evoke bombers) in favor of carrots (which still got her interrogated by some overzealous official). She ended up in Illinois, where she worked long hours selling suitcases at a small shop in Chicago and spent her days off at the Art Institute collecting postcards of impressionist paintings she kept in old shoeboxes. In her eighties, after she retired, she picked up painting. One of her most treasured pieces was a watercolor she'd made of three skipping carrots that hung above her kitchen table until she died.

I'd forgotten all about those carrots, but now their prancing feet kicked loose a jumble of memories: afternoons with my grandmother sketching still lifes, our shared love for Seurat, a time when life felt limitless. I remembered sitting for hours in her kitchen studying the graceful swing of the carrots' bodies while she described the art classes she'd taught in the camp, then proudly read aloud letters from her former students, who kept writing to her sixty years on. I never thought to ask her why she'd felt a pull toward art. The way she held forth on the carrots didn't leave room for questions: Art simply wasn't optional, or a luxury, but a necessary part of life. I felt a sharp stab of regret that I didn't know the feeling.

I stuffed the carrots back into the drawer, but those sneaky vegetables followed me back to New York and trailed me around as I settled back into my routine. The carrots stomped their feet when I ate takeout at my desk. They crossed their arms when I texted from the toilet while listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Their wagging orange heads insisted that something was missing, that my life was dull dull dull compared to what I'd once imagined it could be. While I tried to answer emails, they danced my mind round and round the puzzle of why my grandmother had treated art, arguably the least essential thing, as essential-what she turned to when life turned itself inside out. I couldn't shake the carrots. Worse, I couldn't shake the sense that my predictable, ruthlessly optimized life had started to feel maddeningly claustrophobic. The carrots stirred up an idea: What if art could stop the walls from closing in?

MODERATION HAS NEVER been my strong point, and once I got the itch for art, I cannonballed in. I thought art might inject beauty into my blah routine-"wash away from the soul the dust of everyday life," as Picasso supposedly said it could.

My awakening was rude.

I know I'm not supposed to admit this, but between you and me, a lot of the art I saw was barely recognizable as art. In the hushed halls of a renowned art museum, I beheld a giant stuffed bear with horns and a nose ring, and felt my heart go out to a mutilated chair. I spent a particularly disorienting evening at Bridget Donahue, a Lower East Side gallery my detective work had revealed to be the womb for all things cool. At the gallery's opening, I squeezed past neckbeards and ironic tube socks to squint at a plasticky black seagull dangling ankle-height on a string. "Alcohol helps," volunteered a guy next to me. (It didn't.) I stayed long enough to catch a performance by the artist-a burly, middle-aged man who padded out into the gallery in a Snow White costume, climbed halfway up a metal ladder, and started mumbling into a microphone about an "animatronic goat trapped in an inflatable bush of cooked pubic hair."

I don't know what else to tell you about the art. It was there. I was there. I knew enough not to utter the two phrases guaranteed to brand me a lowbrow loser ("But is it art?" and "A five-year-old could do that"). But beyond that-I stared at it and got nothing but the familiar feeling that everyone got the punch line except me. I mean, was art just whatever people with expensive graduate degrees said it was? What made it good? Were those stupid questions? What did these geniuses nodding thoughtfully at the world's worst Snow White impersonator know that I didn't?

I stalked artists on Instagram, scoured art blogs, subscribed to every newsletter I could find, and forced myself to make small talk with strangers at art openings. I went to art talks, art shows, art museums, and art galleries (which is a fancier way of saying art stores). I hit up every remote acquaintance vaguely connected with art to catch up over coffee, then pelted them with questions. But all over town, the art refused to speak to me. It sat there, smug and withholding, whispering an inside joke to everyone but me.

Try a simpler hobby, I encouraged myself. Bake bread. Pickle. And it was tempting, really it was, only I couldn't stop thinking I had to be missing out on...