I’ve Faked My Way Through Every Interesting Thing I’ve Ever Done

because that's how life works sometimes

For instance: My second ever art job was the assistant to the president of a very old, very posh blue-chip gallery on the Upper East Side. My responsibilities were to print out the president’s emails and order her lunch and butter-up her clients and organize her schedule. It was a basic gallerina position (that required a master’s degree and designer shoes and paid next to nothing, but that is beside the point). Several months after I was hired, there was a big shake up. My boss, the president, an art world icon who had led the gallery for decades, was fired. Indeed, security escorted her past my desk, down the stairs and onto the E 70th Street sidewalk without so much as a ciao.

At the time, I had no idea what had happened. What I did know was that the gallery purse strings were immediately tightened. Job titles shifted. Many staff were let go. Stable artists jumped ship. The debacle was written about in the trades. And somehow, in all the mess, I ended up with a bump in pay, a new title, my own office—and responsibilities I had no freaking clue how to manage. 

I was suddenly invoicing half-million dollar paintings. I was escorting a famously cranky professional tennis player around the gallery’s townhouse. I was manning booths at art fairs, selling mid-century masterworks to men in linen suits and women in Louboutins. I was having phone calls with artists whose work I’d (very recently) studied in grad school. One day my office phone rang; it was the preparator. He needed me down in shipping to condition report a Jackson Pollock painting that had just returned from a museum show.

I had no idea how to do this. But did that stop me? No, ma’am. I took the little digital camera that my Guggenheim-trained predecessor left in my desk drawer, a clipboard and pencil, white cotton gloves, a tape measurer—and I condition-reported the shit out of that painting. 

me with my hair in my face at the gallery with some art people a long time ago, pretending to know what is going on

That wasn’t the first time I’d chanced my way in something interesting. When I was the arts editor at a midwestern alt-weekly, I was the only person on the payroll who’d read the latest Salman Rushdie novel. So when we heard that the author was coming to town to give a lecture, it fell to me to interview him. Did I balk at this? Of course I did. I was terrified. I felt stupid and young and inadequate. But I came up with questions anyway. I did it. And the worst thing that happened was that Sir Rushdie made fun of my spelling mistake (boarder is not the same thing as border, and I will never, ever forget that).

Long before KNIFE, which is amazing btw.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of ‘faking it as you make it’ since I sent out my last newsletter on the evils of track changes and realized something weird: I like track changes. I’ve been working on the Tell Them You Lied flap copy with my editor, and I’ve been so excited each time a hacked-up tangled-wire mess of a document lands in my inbox. Why? Because it means progress. It means collaboration. It means it’s all happening. 

The truth is, track changes were never really the problem. It was the fact that I didn’t (yet) know how to use them correctly. Like with the gallery job and the interview and a million other wonderful things—-teaching sun salutations to a room full of 5 year olds; getting my teenage self to NYC from Ohio via Newark before GPS, Uber, and online airline booking; ushering my son through a successful kidney transplant; working at a bakery not knowing the difference between ganache and a galette; writing a novel without understanding story structure—like with all these things, I had to learn extemporaneously, with stops and starts and pivots and circle-backs and, most of all, with the deep desire for a positive outcome.

That’s how the best shit gets done, isn’t it? On the fly, with gusto, and because you really, really want it.

And hey, guess what. Turns out my old boss, the art world icon, was fired from the gallery for cause. Because that Jackson Pollock I condition reported?

It was a fake.