Should the role of art writing be to make art clear to the masses? A persistent strain of art commentary believes in this mission, investing it with quasi-populist political value. We must, this line of argument goes, clear away the jargon of elitist gatekeepers to speak plainly to The People.
I’m half-sympathetic to this—but only half. An era like ours, where the right-wing culture war against “liberal elites” combines with the Big Tech domination of media that turns everything into “content,” demands careful thinking about what the stakes of “aesthetic populism” really are.
A handy case study to help think through art’s relation to populism in the recent past comes in the form of the US journalist Bianca Bosker’s 2024 book, pitched to a popular audience, called Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists & Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. In it, Bosker tells the story of the months she embedded herself with a variety of mainly lower-level figures in the New York art world at the tail end of the 2010s. She set out to discover the mysterious inner workings of what she viewed as an opaque milieu where “pretension hung in the air like an unacknowledged fart.”
In a nutshell, Bosker’s contention is that the dominant players in contemporary art—the dealers, curators, and tastemakers who, she contends, form a group that self-identifies as “The Heads”—are deliberately hostile to normies in order to preserve cachet and value. Art insiders, she claims, scorn “beauty” because they hate anything ordinary people like. Meanwhile, conceptual art, which does not revolve around beauty, is off-putting on purpose to anyone who isn’t an insider. Nothing makes Bosker more irritated than her sense that art-goers must read wall labels or texts, or be familiar with art history, to “get” art. Art people speak in a theory-accented code because it makes them feel smart and special. The Heads reference what Bosker sarcastically calls “the holy trinity of Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze” to scaffold their high-minded platitudes in service of the art world’s fundamental goal of cultivating exclusionary social capital.
While not exactly untrue, this portrait of the art world also strikes me as very old.1 Bosker’s picture of art’s pretentious discourse is almost identical to how Tom Wolfe describes the formalist and conceptual art world in The Painted Word in the 1970s, where he alleges that a cabal ruined art by substituting theoretical references for technical skill. It’s close to how Dave Hickey describes the academic and biennial art world of the 1990s in Air Guitar, where he argues that art’s moral posturing is aimed at scoring nonprofit funding by posing as better than the base commercial pleasures of the masses.
The genuinely useful and updated thing about Bosker’s book is how much evidence she provides to support the opposite of her stated thesis that art is locked inside its own walled-off intellectual playground. Despite her irritation with the scene’s pretentions, what is striking to me in Bosker’s pages of pop ethnography is how infrequently theory or criticism featured in the scenes and conversations she describes, either as the mechanism for creating value or as a guide to art practice. Her subjects rarely engage in-depth with contemporary critics. In the entire book, the main ones that come up are Chris Wiley, whose Artnet essay “The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism” is mentioned; Peter Schjeldahl, whose pan of KAWS in the New Yorker Bosker finds gratingly elitist; and Jerry Saltz, one of whose tweets is discussed. Far more common as a motivator of passion, a dictator of norms, and a topic of discussion for all the different players she talks to is Instagram.
A downtown dealer at a gallery Bosker embeds with for the book—by far her biggest symbol of art-world pretention—tells her to read Clement Greenberg, but also spends hours decoding art memes to her. A collector barges into a gallery Bosker is observing to demand that the owner un-like a meme that mocked an organization he supports. A painter admits that “fact number one” of her career is that figurative painting looks good on Instagram. An emerging artist Bosker meets finds serious art spaces hard to crack and so starts exploring the role of sexy-Instagram-influencer-as-performance-art, then slowly loses herself in it as her real audience becomes men buying her used underwear. A pair of collectors state explicitly that they have no use for the theory-infused art history textbook Art Since 1900 but instead discover artists by looking at which ones are followed by the gallery directors they like on Instagram: “We would not be the collectors we are without Instagram.” Perhaps these incidents don’t stand out to Bosker because the denizens of art seem to use the venerable photo-sharing app as most people do. There is no secret code. Yet the less-than-exotic ways that social media shapes clout are the most contemporary-seeming and distinctive parts of the book, showing how newly accessible means of image-sharing have reshaped which images are talked about and how.
Back in 2012, during yet another flare-up in the eternal war over whether contemporary art is a fraud, 60 Minutes ran a segment mocking the industry’s “artspeak.” I mainly remember it for a reply by Roberta Smith—no friend of academic jargon, as the then co-lead critic of the New York Times—who very reasonably noted that not everything that benefited from context was either elitist or fraudulent. “The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we’re lucky, we all have at least one.” The sense of participating in a culture with its own reference points isn’t just gatekeeping to keep people out but, very often, a part of the allure; it makes you want to get beyond the gate to figure out the mystery.
For me personally, the sense that visual art had a particularly heady set of references was a large part of what drew me to the field. My degree in college was in cultural studies and upon graduation I didn’t know exactly what to do with my esoteric interests that included psychanalysis, experimental film, and narrative semiotics. I found in the pages of art magazines a domain where ideas like these seemed to connect with a world outside of academia. Of course, I also understood that theory was mainly misused in promoting art, that the references to Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson and Judith Butler, were mainly ornamental. But if art institutions and magazines often exploited theory superficially, they did so because this was a domain where people were generally expected to be interested in ideas. And there actually were such people around.
If Bosker’s narrative made me wrinkle my brow, it wasn’t because I was in denial about how hermetic art and art writing alike could be. It was because the book focused so singularly on attacking this angle without seeing how so many pressures of the last decade were pushing the other way. Jeff Koons, the apex predator of the art market for decades, is not a “theory artist”; he literally instructs you to turn off your critical brain and just enjoy. KAWS, whose vast popularity has been latched onto by the museum circuit with a vengeance in the 2020s, is not an artist who feigns standoffish anti-commercialism. Yayoi Kusama’s “mirror room” installations were the megahit of the 2010s, after crowds discovered what great Instagram sets they were.
As for art writing, the speed and connectivity of digital media has created pressure that it be shorter, faster, more visual, more topical, more general interest. The takeover of interpersonal communications by digital technology has flooded the sensorium; in the US, the specter of post-literacy was coming on fast at just the moment that Bosker wrote “never read the wall text” as her major takeaway from observing art spaces. In major parts of cultural production, cachet has moved from the hipster obscurity of the late-Gen X, early millennial era of the 2000s and towards relatable transparency, from familiarity with intellectual references and towards responsiveness to current events. In the second half of the 2010s various art phenomena suggested a new primacy of pure image circulation over text—e.g., the made-for-Instagram museum, the curator-as-influencer, the trendiness of fashion-y figurative painting, and then in 2021–22, the brief, bewildering NFT craze.
There’s a political reason to add nuance to the idea that art theory represents pure hostility to popular energies as well. The 2010s were also what Vincent Bevins calls the “mass protest decade,” marked by massive spikes in protest all around the world, also turbo-charged by omnipresent smartphones and networked digital media. A fluky feature of this collision of new media and new protest was that academic concepts suddenly broke out of the containment of the campus bubble and entered the mainstream lingo of liberal society: “cultural appropriation,” “decolonial,” “intersectionality,” “performative.” (Zooming out, you might see a trace of this even in the refreshed pop-culture visibility of terms like “feminism” and “socialism,” creeds long debated politely in academia, where they had retreated after the eighties Reagan reaction, while being considered marginal in the wider world.) The nature of “popular language” changed fast.
When Bosker describes a fun-hating scene obsessed with “the holy trinity of Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze,” that’s a metonym for the post-’68 leftist inheritance of culture as it had become implanted in art school. In truth, this quip is another way the book’s image of art’s obsessions seems oddly old. The museum and biennial world’s go-to references in the 2010s were more often theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Paul B. Preciado, reflecting attempts to respond to new political energies around race and representation that were in the air at this time.
What is certainly true is that the culture around visual art has implied a certain ambient progressive comfort with critical theory, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial theory as intellectual coordinates. As the situation stands now in the post–social media era of cultural discourse, all of these actually have broken into a public consciousness far beyond the university and the museum—but most notably as the imagined components of what Trump’s Executive Order on the Smithsonian of March 27, 2025 calls a “corrosive ideology” whose hold on culture, he alleges, is destroying the nation from within, and that must be purged in the name of tradition. That is, they have been mainstreamed as memeified, all-purpose folk demons to justify foaming-at-the-mouth reaction. You may well need a critique of just which types of theory dominate in art, and the alienating tics of art people and their pesky love of text. Unfortunately, you do so now with the major burden of having to avoid sounding like that other kind of anti-elite populism.
Despite her skepticism, Bosker’s book ultimately aims to make a case for contemporary art. She ends her investigation by finding that she likes some weird stuff much more than she did going in, and telling readers that the beauty she seeks comes in many forms. All to the good. Yet the leveling pressures of digital media and the intense anxiety of the new culture wars are major issues looming over the landscape. If they are notably in the background and out of focus in this picture of art’s culture now, that says something about the limits of this genre of aesthetic populism. It suggests that a pitfall of the demand for clarity in art writing is that it easily conceals a demand to reduce the complexity of its objects and lower its stakes.
I won’t go so far as to defend “The Heads,” since I’ve never actually heard anyone refer to themselves using the term. But we do need to keep our brains and our wits about us.
There are, however, details in the book that are untrue, often because Bosker is bending the facts in the name of making art seem more cult-like and secretive. For instance, on page 35, Bosker writes, “It was the Nazis who helped perfect what we now think of as the white cube … The look became so popular that, historian Charlotte Klonk observes, ‘one is almost tempted to speak of the white cube as a Nazi invention.’ You’d think with friends like these the white cube would be verboten, and yet for ninety years, it’s stuck and spread.” If you look at the source, an article on the Tate museum website, Klonk’s full quote is: “In England and France white only becomes a dominant wall colour in museums after the Second World War, so one is almost tempted to speak of the white cube as a Nazi invention. At the same time, the Nazis also mobilised the traditional connotation of white as a colour of purity, but this played no role when the flexible white exhibition container became the default mode for displaying art in the museum.” See →.
