Bianca Del Rio Podcast

[Pablo Tatts]

Biancaimmersed herself for 5 years into the New York art scene as a gallery assistant, artist assistant, curator, museum security guard and more as part of a journey into the secretive world of art and artists

In this chat with Claire Bown, host of The Art Engager podcast, Bianca shares what she discovered about the art world, how her relationship with art has evolved, and how her experiences with various artworks have changed the way she sees the world.

We talk about some of the roles she immersed herself in for the book and what she learned from them, We also discuss museum labels, wall texts, and whether they are central to understanding a work of art. And Bianca talks about spending long periods of time with artworks, particularly with a Brancusi sculpture, which brought lots of new insights and fascination.

Claire Bown: So congratulations on the new book, Get The Picture. I absolutely loved reading it. Very funny, very clever. And I think on many levels, very eye opening too. Actually a listener got in touch with me about a month or so ago and she said, I should read your book.

I love the way you describe yourself as a journalist obsessed with obsession. And that got me thinking about when curiosity develops from just a mere kind of passing fascination to an obsession. So could you talk a little bit about, yeah, your obsessions?

My last book was called Cork Dork, which was about the obsessive world of sommeliers and wine lovers and also this journey to understand these, what I would consider forgotten senses of taste and smell. And Get The Picture, which is my new book, grew also out of my obsession with obsession and is about the incredibly passionate, obsessive world of art and the people who live for it.

Bianca Bosker: Yeah, art was a passion of mine growing up. I painted there was a time when I flirted with applying to art school. And then I went off to college and adult Bianca grabbed the wheel and I became very focused on, getting a job that came with a dental plan, basically.

And also The people around it had this approach to life that felt expansive and made my own ,existence feel claustrophobic by comparison. And to be fair, they pitied me. A lot of the art lovers that I met told me that I lacked visual literacy, which they said was downright dangerous in a world so saturated with images.

Bianca Bosker: Yeah, absolutely. I was really taken aback. Look, perhaps I was naive, but, getting access was incredibly difficult. Now, admittedly, I had a rather pushy plan. I wanted to not just interview people, but actually learn by doing.

I wanted to go work at the art world. I wanted specifically to start at a gallery because, for me I just think that, as I now know from experience there is something very different about asking a gallerist how they sell art versus, spending eight hours a day schmoozing with millionaires and selling, a 9, 000 dollar photograph in the back of an Uber during Art Basel on Miami Beach while people are doing cocaine around you.

And so, yes, I had this admittedly pushy plan, but even then it was so difficult getting access. people told me that my whole plan of wanting to work at a gallery as a journalist was impossible, maybe even dangerous. And, I really felt like an FBI agent trying to get in with the mob.

So, yes, to your point about the exclusivity. I eventually got a gig. My first job was working as an assistant at this very cool up and coming gallery in Brooklyn, where I started becoming initiated into the strategic snobbery that the art world uses to keep people out.

But I will say that what frustrated me on a very personal level was, I was trying to, develop my eye. gave myself entirely over to the art world, and as I was trying to develop my eye, what was frustrating to me is the way that this strategic snobbery applied, not just to finding the art or buying it, but to appreciating it.

Bianca Bosker: Yeah, so Each were incredibly challenging and difficult in their own way, which is part of what made them so fantastic, I think, because I was learning so much. Being a security guard, I will say that at the beginning I was So bored that I would just pray that someone would touch a painting so I could tell them not to.

But I will say that I think working as a studio assistant for up and coming artists really was transformative in my relationship with art, but also my relationship with the world. And, the deliberately erected barriers to entry that the art world puts up applied also to savoring the art and I was getting frustrated as I worked at one of these galleries with just how much art connoisseurs seemed to focus on everything outside the work itself.

Claire Bown: I love that. You were just reminding me of therelationship you developed with the Brancusi piece in the Guggenheim when you were working there. In the second half of the book, I really noticed

Now, that being said, I think that I certainly found paths that resonated more with me. And I was able to exercise some of these looking techniques I learned in artists studios while working as a security guard at the Guggenheim. There are a few reasons I decided to work as a security guard, but one of them was That I was curious to know, how would being around art for hours on end with no possibility for escape, influence my relationship with art?

And I will say that, yes, as I said, I was a little bit bored at moments in the beginning and I began to break up that boredom by giving myself different exercises on each topic. And one of them was to spend 40 minutes looking at a single artwork and 40 minutes because that was the duration of our post.

And I began to develop this relationship with the piece and with a lot of the pieces at the Guggenheim. I began to feel what I can only describe as love for this sculpture. It was this feeling that I recognized from being in love. It was this feeling that I could be around it for as far as I could see into the future without getting sick of its company.

Another artist, Liz Ainsley, talked about How something as simple as riding a subway, when you lift those filters of expectation, when you allow your brain to take in the full nuance, chaos and beauty of the world around you, it becomes this impossible miracle.

so interested in hearing your thoughts about this. Cause I, I wrote a post last year about wall labels. It was on social media, it was just questioning whether we need them in all cases, whether we could have a different experience with art if we were just focusing on the art itself. And this post,

of course there are times and instances where the wall text can be helpful. I remember going to see an artist retrospective with an artist, and it was so interesting the way that she really examined the years in which the works were made and the medium in which they were made, and that was this other layer of information that allowed her to get another view onto the work, right?

It was a Joseph Beuys piece. It was this dangling bare light bulb over a wooden table and chair with the aforementioned all important layer of dust. And I mentioned I had relationships with different pieces this was definitely an enemy sort of relationship, like this work I just thought was so ungenerous, I did not understand what it was about, the wall label was to me totally useless, I, it read like it was describing an entirely different piece.

Bianca Bosker: Or having a physical experience with the artwork. I do think that the modernist started this idea that looking at art was more philosophical than physical experience. It was a little bloodless.

I do think That is a helpful way of thinking about our relationship with art. The same way that sitting down with a person at dinner is very different from seeing them over FaceTime, seeing a work of art in person is very different from seeing it on Instagram. You are a physical being in space.

I think that, in terms of my own relationship with art, first of all, I think I see art everywhere now. I ended up meeting this performance artist who had spent several years performing as an ass influencer on Instagram

And I will say Mandy allFIRE and Julie Curtiss and some of these other people I met pushed me to this place of having a much more expansive idea of what art is. I think we live in the aftermath of these rather arbitrary decisions made by status conscious Europeans in the 1760s that Essentially elevated certain things to the pedestal of fine art and dismissed everything else as craft. And it used to be different.

Artists have this amazing ability and freedom to just follow their interests and incorporate it into their work. I remember talking with Julie about the experience of being a journalist and the way that, I write something and then I share it with an editor.

Welcome to the Gina Bianca Podcast: a podcast for hair stylists, salon owners and modern entrepreneurs! The official podcast of stylist, salon owner, educator, life and business coach Gina Bianca. Follow on instagram for even more valuable content to empower and elevate the beauty industry! @iamginabianca @ginabiancapodcast

@biancalexis brings a whole new level to the world of eclectic DJing. Anyone who has regularly tuned into her radio sets for dublab or NTS will know that there is no limit to what she might play. It isn't just the electronic spectrum she traverses with ease, but also soul, synth-pop, folk, post-punk, soft rock and myriad other sounds. She also knows how to hold down a vibe in the club, either at her Standard Downtown LA residency or anywhere else around Europe. Later in summer, she will play at both Lente Kabinet Festival and then Dekmantel Selectors, but first...Bianca keeps one foot firmly on the dance floor with her mix this week. That's not to say it is a traditional club set, but the whole thing is underpinned by a very seductive and danceable groove that is always slowly building. There are proto-house cuts, dusty and analogue 80s rhythms, flashes of acid and breezy, feel-good sounds that send you off on a high. It is a perfect taster of what to expect from this exciting break-out selector.

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