What are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye - Softcover

Gompertz, Will

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241965993 ISBN 13: 9780241965993

Publisher: Viking, 2016

Synopsis

What is modern art? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it worth so much damn money? Join Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art. You will learn: not all conceptual art is bollocks; Picasso is king (but Cézanne is better); Pollock is no drip; Dali painted with his moustache; a urinal changed the course of art, why your five year-old really couldn't do it. Refreshing, irreverent and always straightforward, What Are You Looking At? asks all the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask. Your next gallery trip is going to be a little less intimidating and a lot more interesting.

About this title

About the Author:

As the BBC's Arts Editor, Will Gompertz has interviewed and observed many of the world's leading artists, directors, novelists, musicians, actors and designers. Creativity Magazine in New York ranked him as one of the 50 most original thinkers in the world. He is the author of the international bestselling art history book What Are You Looking At? which has been published in over 15 languages.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Gompertz succeeds in his stated mission to take a “personal, informative, anecdotal, and accessible” approach to defining the full spectrum of modern art movements, beginning with impressionism, by portraying the instigating artists and explaining what they were up to and why. A former director of the Tate in London, and currently the arts editor at the BBC, Gompertz is adept at elucidating complex aesthetic ideas and artistic techniques and linking revolutionary art movements to social upheaval (war, communism, the Holocaust) and scientific and technological developments (quantum physics, television, the atom bomb). He revels in the creative, multidisciplinary synergy surrounding such key figures as Monet, Picasso, de Kooning, and Warhol. And he daringly takes a novelist’s approach to such foundational acts as Duchamp’s purchase of a urinal in New York City in 1917 to create a “readymade” sculpture that embodied the pivotal realization that if an artist says something is a work of art, it is. Gompertz adeptly divides each broad movement into its intriguing subgroups and includes many more artists, critics, and dealers than the usual suspects. His dissections of performance and conceptual art are uniquely clarifying, and he even coins a keenly apt term for such current provocateurs as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons: the “entrepreneurialists.” A deeply enlightening and buoyant history of modern art and beyond. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0241965993
• ISBN 13: 9780241965993
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464