“At the dawn of modernism, artists worked hard in their studios, usually in isolation, suffering all kinds of deprivations, until they would be discovered by a dealer or taken on by a patron, critic or curator. Nowadays, artistic suffering has not vanished, but its nature has changed. Art-school-produced, professional artists spend less time in a studio, but rather live a nomadic life between airports, recovering from jetlag bought on by their endless transits between residencies, biennials, art fairs, speaking engagements, openings and other social events.”

I am reading from Pablo Helguera’s immensely entertaining, witty, accurate, and well-written Manual of Contemporary Art Style (Jorge Pinto Books, 2007), which bills itself as “the essential guide for artists, curators, and critics” with “more than 100 key tips for impeccable etiquette in the art world.” I wholeheartedly recommend this book, which doubles as a kind of anthropological field guide to the living world of art.

Laid out in the format of a traditional style guide, with point-by-point rules for proper behavior when, for instance, approaching strangers at openings or designing one’s business cards, this thin tome is wiser than its meager pages (100) suggest. It is written by someone who knows the art world well and who is ultimately fond of its idiosyncrasies. Helguera’s goal, stated with or without irony (this is unclear) is to “erase certain behavioral taboos that exist around this world, and to openly present, once and for all, the rules that many of us follow.”

Helguera is a pretty insightful guy, with a knack for close observation and coining funny phrases. When discussing art fair behavior, he calls attention to the need for dealers to develop “spatial omnipresence,” so that a gallerist who “masters this technique will be able to intercept any potential sale by having absolute visual and aural awareness of the activity within his or her booth without turning his or her head in a conspicuous manner.” He also recommends for dealers a comportment of “slight arrogance,” because “an overly helpful attitude will be interpreted as lack of experience or extreme desperation to sell work.”

He goes to great pains to analyze “namedropping strategies.” When it comes to museum directors, he proposes that the best ones are “known for their ability to disguise their censorship processes.” Based on a nonscientific survey, the author even constructs a list of artworld personages, ranking them in terms of their approachability at openings (Arthur Danto ranks first, Richard Serra and Thomas McEvilley come last.)

For artists, Helguera encourages a dress code that keeps up with fashion, but “adding an unexpected element (for example, colored socks),” which will “send the message that, while the artist is able to conform to the rules of the game, he or she is still able to provide an artistic, individual vision.” For artists who want to leave a deep impact, he counsels a strategy of “hyper-self-aggrandizement” (e.g., always asking for business class tickets for yourself and your assistant), except for truly successful artists, who should always practice “hyper-humility,” for example, “act with surprise when someone expresses interest about their work, as if this were a rarity.”

On and on it goes, with sometimes hilarious observations that will ring true for anyone who has spent five minutes at a gallery opening. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Helguera reserves his most acerbic comments for critics, whom, he insists, artists should avoid at all costs. Among the routine sins of critics are “Adornamentation” – the practice “of compulsively quoting random phrases by philosophers such as Adorno, Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, Nietszche and Benjamin” – and “Baroquism,” which consists of “obscuring the meaning of something being said in order to add an esoteric layer to the work being analyzed.” But in the end, no blood is spilled here. It’s all clean fun. Buy this book.