While popular cliché is that young artists are often baristas, bartenders, or waiters, if not trust-fund babies, a lot of them do actually manage to find employment within the art world, and the luckiest art-school grads find jobs as assistants in the studios of more established artists. These apprenticeships—in which the up-and-comer lays down the ground of an art star’s abstractions, buffs the chrome of multimillion-dollar sculptures, does finger-cramping filigree work, or… fetches coffee—can often yield key introductions to curators and future collectors, providing a step up for one’s career. Most intriguingly, though, they also generate something else: a shadow family tree of the art world, where artistic influence can be seen transferring from one generation to the next.
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