LinkedIn presents.

I'm Rufus Griskam and I'm Caleb Bisinger and this is the next big idea.

Today, how a journey into the bowels of the art world taught journalist Bianca Basker how to see. My first job after college was at Christie's, the auction house. It was something of an odd choice. I'd majored in English, not in art history. In fact, my familiarity with the art historical canon was so cursory that I kept a document in my desk called

how to pronounce famous artist's names.

But I was drawn to the glamour of the art world, the opulence. And to tell you the truth, it was glamorous. I wore a suit every day. I was welcomed into the grand homes of prominent collectors, where I had the rather surreal experience of seeing works by masters like Rauschenberg and Rothko and Richter, I think I pronounce those right, hanging

nonchalantly on living room walls. Also, one time I bumped into Leonardo DiCaprio, I literally collided with him.

So that was pretty cool. But the longer I spent in the art world, the more convinced

I became that I would never really fit in.

I wasn't debonair enough. I wasn't European.

I'd never be one of the cool kids, the chosen ones, the bon Vivance par excellence. So I quit. That was almost 10 years

ago, and I haven't really looked back, but I have been thinking a lot lately about my layover in the art world

Thanks to a brilliant new book a New York Times bestseller by journalist Bianca Bosker

It's called Get the Picture, a mind-bending journey

among the inspired artists and obsessive art fiends who taught me how to see.

Bianca worked at galleries as an artist assistant, even as a museum security guard trying to understand not just how the art world operates, but why art tickles our gray matter, why it touches our

souls, why it matters.

Like me, she often felt like an unwelcome guest who'd wandered into a private party by mistake.

A party, she writes, where pretension hung in the air, like an unacknowledged fart. Unlike me, she stuck it out, obsessively working

to push past the pretension so she could understand why so many people devote so much time and energy and money to something with no obvious practical value.

I think our book would be worth reading even if it was only a fly-on-the-wall account of the New York art scene.

But Bianca offers us more than that.

She goes deep on the growing body of sociological, neurological, and psychological research that aims to understand why humans have been making. neurological and

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