Five Essential Books About the NYC Art World

Journalist Bianca Bosker has a knack for cutting through frills and cracking the codes of the snobbiest subcultures. In this 2024 survey (subtitled A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See), she parses the inscrutable rites of the art world with an anthropological acumen draped in folksy frankness and sexed up with all the drama of The Devil Wears Prada. Citing sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Bosker attempts to get behind the omertà of Manhattan’s white walls and pose some perennial questions: What is art—and what is good art? Does taste have value? What does it mean to have an eye? Though revelations purported to be found in hot-dog-cart art can strain credulity, Bosker’s conclusion is persuasive: To get a picture, she suggests, requires understanding the bigger one—and then rejecting it.

Brandon Taylor’s third novel is set in the restless summer of 2022, when Manhattan was still wired with memories of protest and pandemic. In a fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side, Wyeth, fresh from a Midwest MFA, is struggling to make a painting. Scenes inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman and Eric Rohmer have won him a modest following, but now he strains to square his style with expectations for Black painting. Old questions assume new stakes: What do we owe ourselves? Does art belong to life? Must it? If sometimes too scrupulous in its commitment to the quotidian, Taylor’s is a rigorous portrait of the artist as a young-ish man confronting the “whole dizzy business of trying to be a black painter” in a post–George Floyd world.

Schooled in the fates of once-neglected women artists, the protagonist in Siri Hustvedt’s novel doesn’t bank on posterity. In a warehouse in Red Hook, Harriet Burden prepares an elaborate hoax designed to raise the curtain on the sexism endemic to the art market—the fact that, as she puts it, “artistic endeavors fare better in the mind of the crowd when […] it can locate a cock and a pair of balls.” What might seem grounds for a parable of righteous revenge becomes fodder for a trick-mirror deconstruction of perception itself.

In Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, the art world gets an elevator and expands to the generous footprint of a Bowery loft. The unnamed narrator, a writer recently returned from London, is cajoled into attending an “artistic dinner” with people she’s tried to avoid: an artist (“multidisciplinary”), a curator (“an intellectual bottom-feeder”), and a novelist (“autofiction,” of course). From her corner of a white linen sofa—an homage to the original armchair critic, Thomas Bernhard, on whose novel Woodcutters this book is more
than loosely based—the jaundiced chronicler surveys the “palace of tarted-up vapidity” and lets loose invective fueled by natural wine and ambivalent feelings for a circle she professes to detest but can’t quite shake.

To some, hushed halls suggest the museum as a cloister sequestered from the everyday world. Not so for Patrick Bringley, who, following his brother’s early death, quit a job at The New Yorker to patrol the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a guard. His memoir invites us into an art world defined not by sales and schmoozing, but by long hours and aching soles. As the author’s bereavement finds its match in distended days of standing and looking, the Met comes into view sympathetically: not as a mausoleum of the canonized or a playground for the privileged, but as a vast record of human experience that can help us give shape to our feelings and attend to our lives.