The Bracing Joy of the Workplace Memoir.
My USPAP-compliant summer reading.
“They’re all your hat.” Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006).
I never wondered what an art dealer does. Not because I knew, or because I didn’t idly muse about what various white collar jobs were like—it just never occurred to me to wonder.
My first boss in the industry preferred the term “gallerist” to “dealer,” but she acknowledged that this elided the core of the business model: no deals, no gallery. Virginia cautioned me against wearing too many hats: a dealer or a scholar, a picture-hanger or a flipper, a collector or a hoarder—you can’t be everything. These were among the few circumscriptions she enjoyed: Zabriskie Gallery’s exhibition program was a trackless wild. Contemporary Japanese photography and early American modernist painting; photographs by Brancusi and mid-century abstract sculpture. A gallerist can’t be everything, but a gallery apparently could.
The job is eclipsed by the institution—and so I never wondered what a dealer does before I attached myself to one. Not until long after I had embarked upon my career did I form a concrete notion of the role. No matter how you try to stay in your lane, the job requires a lot of hats: scholarship and appraisal and connoisseurship and deal-making and spreadsheets and spackling and bedside manner—all part of the gig. But how big a part is negotiable, and each of those parts requires a shift of professional priorities.
Take appraisal, for example. Not until I started classes with the Appraisers Association of America last year did I have it spelled out for me. Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice describes the “performance” of appraisal—as opposed to spelling out what an appraisal is, USPAP constrains how it is done. Viz., I am USPAP-compliant, rather than USPAP-certified. A critical element of that compliance is how you represent what hat you’re wearing, as USPAP spells out:
“An appraiser must comply with USPAP when obligated by law or regulation, or by agreement with the client or intended users. In addition to these requirements, an individual should comply any time that individual represents that he or she is performing the service as an appraiser.”
This seems circular, but it’s actually important because of USPAP’s Ethics Rule:
“An appraiser must not advocate the cause or interest of any party or issue.”
That’s designed to make sure an appraiser is objective and impartial in the appraisal, but there don’t seem to be any limits to the meaning of “advocacy.” You can imagine that it would be a violation of the Ethics clause to advocate for Zohran Mamdani in one’s capacity as an appraiser. So, now that you know I am a USPAP-compliant appraiser, I state clearly and conspicuously herewith that no part of Hanging Papers represents an appraisal nor part of my appraisal practice. (Separately: Go Zohran!)
II. Working Life.
It’s one of the few professions I didn’t wonder about as a kid. My mother was a guidance counselor, so add to the usual prompts of “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the leverage of a professional and you won’t be surprised to learn that at twelve, my imagination was bent on becoming Batman. Not being Batman—I didn’t want to be the winged avatar of nocturnal vengeance—but becoming: I was inspired by the story of Batman’s years of training. After witnessing his parents’ death at the hands of a common thug, Bruce Wayne wanders the globe, apprenticing himself to the best practitioners in every field: forensic pathology with the greatest forensic pathologist, chemistry with the best chemist, hand-to-hand combat with the best fighter, with stints as a dishwasher and auto-mechanic along the way. It’s a twist on the “Renaissance Man”: the super-hero of the twentieth century will be boundlessly competent.
This was my idyll, if not my career plan. How long does it take to reach perfect competency as a trash collector, a short-order chef, a barista? I’d carve out a few weeks for each of these, with a more extensive investment for forestry and pulmonology.
This didn’t pan out—I got sucked into the pictures trade right out of college—but over the past twenty years, a literary genre has sprung up to service my fantasies. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential is an early entrant in a form that reaches its baroque period with The Bear, and its fugue state with Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. It’s existentially refreshing to find out that everyone’s jobs are stressful and insane in the backroom, no matter how composed they may appear at front of house.
Plenty of people wrote about their working lives before, but the genre seems to have crystallized in the twenty-first century. Kitchen Confidential (2000) succeeds on the humanity of Anthony Bourdain—a flawed book by a flawed man, but what other chef has inspired such sense of kinship? Julia Child may compel your belief in the recipe and Michael Pollan may compel your belief in food, but Bourdain compels your belief that you are seen—a prize far beyond the advice not to order seafood on a Monday.
Jacob Tomsky’s Heads in Beds (2012) performs a similar service for the hospitality industry, serving up a slighter serving of humanity (is the encounter with Brian Wilson humanizing?) and extensive practical tips. The industry, so facelessly deferential, is in need of some humanizing, and though Tomsky’s book is too crowded with surface detail to be genuinely deep, it undeniably peels back the veneer.
The veneer of service industry jobs is performatively opaque, but I wasn’t prepared for how surprising the working life of a biologist is. Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl (2016) puts the elbow grease into the grounding pathos that Tomsky lacks, but it is her seemingly off-hand characterizations of the economics of “curiosity-driven research” that dazzle. With the funding of that sector frozen for the past thirty years, there is a sobering observation: “too many scientists,” not enough science. Disturbing lucidity peppered by poetic lessons about life from plants.
I was squeamish about opening Judy Melinek’s memoir of her years performing autopsies, but Working Stiff (2014) proved less triggering than Jahren’s more saccharine passages. That a catalogue of gruesome bodily horrors can be as riveting and boring as a book about forestry is proof that the genre has found its stride. Apart from one haunting vignette that I can never un-imagine, Melinek’s story has all the same water-cooler talk, the petty intra-office politics, the professional burnout as all these other books.
Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (2019) peels back something even more opaque: doctor-patient confidentiality in the world of talk therapy. She pauses occasionally in this breathless page-turner to mention that the through-line from her background in TV-writing to the therapist’s couch is the need to tell a good story; hers is so good it simply can not be both true and ethical to divulge.
Charting the field, there’s a strange fraternity to the authors as they appear as characters in their own pages. From page one, there’s something that makes them stand out against the frieze of their colleagues. Of course they are our narrators, our protagonists, but there’s also a sense that they don’t fit into their field from day one. Tomsky is most pronounced in this—he mentions his training as a philosopher, and the strangeness of his work as a hotel valet is lost on no one he meets. Tomsky’s going somewhere, you feel—we’re not staying here in the parking garage for very long. And while there’s an element of this in all of these, Kitchen Confidential may be distill it the best. Was Bourdain a good chef? I don’t know any reason to think he wasn’t—but clearly his greater gift was in bringing it to us. An informant, but something higher: a confidante. For all, there’s a sense that they are writing their own tickets out of jobs that have grown intolerably cramped.
All to my benefit, tho—sliding through these zesty page-turners is much easier than going to med school, and anyway, the job of art dealer has turned out to be an expansive one. Not everyone likes writing as much as I do, so I do it more than the average dealer, but we all spend hours pouring over old catalogues and putting together extensive pitches that never see public light; we all get to choose frames and argue about the proper hanging height.
“Which one is mine?” Hugh Jackman’s frustrated magician asks in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006). David Bowie’s Nicolai Tesla gestures to a field full of top hats:
“They’re all your hat.”
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com