Though the book has a genteel tone and its chapter headings take the form of invitations (“Please Come to a Private Memorial Service for Jeffrey Finelli” says one), it makes a bare-knuckled assault on the kind of arriviste culture vulture who can invite visitors to tour her pricey, noxious collection by saying that “everything in this apartment is something.” Naturally this woman will do anything to put the “Lulu” painting on one of her walls.

Ms. Ganek’s characters are stock figures in the art world but relatively exotic ones for chick-lit fiction. There is Mia’s boss, the self-styled Englishman who owns the eponymous Simon Pryce Gallery and has perfected the right combination of cashmere, tortoiseshell, insecurity, Anglophilia and leonine coiffure. There is the famous, big-ticket artist who is less valued for his work than for his trademark gesture of getting naked at parties. There is the big kahuna of a collector who is “so far uptown he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut” and whose admiration of art seems to rises in direct proportion to its market price.

“What’s going on?” Mia wonders, after she has been sent to visit him in “what must be at least 35,000 square feet of ill-conceived home,” and sees a lot of cars. “The assistants have mentioned nothing about a Lexus convention.”

And there is the mysterious Lulu, Finelli’s niece, who has grown from the big-eyed girl in the painting into a ravishing Wall Street tigress. Lulu will reassert her ties to art before the story is over.

As is often the case in books that peer through keyholes, the narrator’s viewpoint is much more interesting than her determinedly adorable character. And “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him” flags noticeably whenever Mia’s secret desires, like her wish to paint, take center stage. Similarly, the dashing art consultant about whom Mia dare not even daydream — until, of course, the point when they fall adorably in love — is turned into a bore by the book’s relentless swooning. His art-world dating affectations, like sending Mia a JPEG picture of a cheeseburger accompanied by the words “Tomorrow night?” are insufferable in their ingenuity.

So it helps that “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him,” the painting, remains the book’s true center. Ms. Ganek allows this picture to mean different things to different people. She measures both their aesthetic wisdom and their avarice according to the ways they try to snag it. The various maneuvers that give each character just desserts make this a glossy, amusing story that still finds time to wonder, in all seriousness, how, why and whether the art world differentiates between trash and treasure.