Bianca Bosker

Warmer climates lead to riper grapes with a higher concentration of sugar, which, by the laws of fermentation, will produce wines with higher alcohol. Grapes from cooler climates generally have lower concentrations of sugar, yielding wines with lower alcohol. So which is it—high or low? Swallow a mouthful of wine and exhale, as if you were trying to check whether your breath stinks. (Spitting will rob you of the full effect.) Take note of how far into your mouth and throat you can feel the burning heat of the alcohol. The back of your tongue? It’s probably lower alcohol—around 12 percent for reds. The back of your throat, near your jaw? Medium, closer to 13, edging on 14 percent.

Pinch the stem of the glass with your fingers, then rotate your wrist in a few swift circles, swirling the wine so that it coats the sides of the goblet. Watch the speed and width of the droplets, or “tears,” that roll down after you’ve stilled your hand. Thick, slow tears with clear definition suggest the wine has higher alcohol levels, where thin, quick tears, or wine that falls in sheets, hint at lower alcohol levels.

I’d gotten obsessed with understanding why art matters, if it does, and whether quality time with a few smears of colored rock on stretched cloth—a “painting” as it’s more commonly known—can really transform our existence.

. The earliest known painting keeps getting older, but the last time I checked, archaeologists had traced the oldest portrait to a cave in Indonesia where, around 45,500 years ago, artists put their finishing touches on a fat figure with purple testicles for a chin. In other words, before Neanderthals went extinct, before mammoths died out, before we figured out how to harvest food or heal bloody wounds, humans applied themselves to painting the portrait of a warty pig. “It is clear that the creation of beautiful and symbolic objects is a characteristic feature of the human way of life,” wrote the biologist J. Z. Young.

The people I was meeting worshipped the idea of an “Eye,” by which they didn’t mean the organ, but a painstakingly cultivated outlook that allegedly enables you to see lots that doesn’t meet the eye, like who’ll be the next Picasso or what’s transcendent about a middle-aged man climbing up a ladder to lecture about burnt pubes.

I learned that art museums evolved out of aristocrats’ palaces and that Piero Manzoni canned his own shit for a sculpture. But what I didn’t learn was why. Why bother with art? Everything I read started from the assumption that Art Was Important, and if I didn’t know why, too bad. “One of the best things about art is that it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone,” said one art critic dismissively in an article that maintained the problem with art isn’t that it’s too elitist but that it’s not elitist enough.

But I found the fear, the reticence, the cageyness that seemed to pervade the art world bizarre. And tantalizing. Artists broke out in hives if you asked them to explain their work. Gallerists hid the prices, then refused to sell you a piece, even if you could pay for it. Curators turned a sickly green when you mentioned the words “general public,” and critics often wrote about the art in code. (“Indexical marks of the artist’s body” would be “finger painting” to you and me.) What happened to art being a “characteristic feature of the human way of life”? Why keep people out? Why keep me out?

To get at the truth about art, I also needed to understand the art world—the throbbing jumble of genius, money, and love that the artists I spoke with nicknamed “the machine.”

hibits, photographing their shows—and his gallery was only open from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m., a holdover from when, until recently, he’d had to jump on his bike and book it to the dinner shift at a South African restaurant nearby.

Everyone I met, including Jack, had offered the same pair of contradictory caveats: There are so many art worlds, and the art world is so small.