What Are You Looking At?
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  • Published: 24 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670920501
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

What Are You Looking At?

150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye

Formats & editions
Paperback
13 Jun 2016
EBook
24 Oct 2012
Audiobook
11 Sep 2014
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For the sceptics, the art lovers, and the 5 million of us who visit the Tate every year - the funniest, liveliest and most accessible history of Modern Art ever written, by the BBC Arts Editor

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 5-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.
  • Published: 24 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670920501
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
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About the author

Will Gompertz

Will Gompertz is a world-leading expert in, and champion of, the arts. Having spent seven years as a Director of the Tate Galleries followed by eleven years as the BBC's Arts Editor, he is now Artistic Director at the Barbican. Will has interviewed and observed many of the world's leading artists, actors, writers, musicians, directors 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 internationally bestselling What Are You Looking At? and Think Like an Artist, both translated into more than 20 languages.

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Praise for What Are You Looking At?

A lively train-ride through the art movements of the modern period ...While he doesn't dumb down the subject, he does take a fresh, energetic approach ... He explains movements and "isms" with clarity and humour

Scotsman

Gompertz flicks through a mental Rolodex of the world's most famous images and describes them with a freshness and vividity that brings them to life

The Times

Gompertz has written an energetic and comprehensive romp through modern art

Independent

Gompertz writes about difficult things - the birth of conceptualism, the link between the pyramidal compositions of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People - without letting on that they are difficult ... this romp through art from the 1860s to now is both hugely accessible and old-fashionedly educative

Independent on Sunday

He is a natural communicator whose passion for art is expressed with wit and verve

Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, on Will Gompertz

Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New redone à la Bill Bryson ... few are the histories of modern art that name check Beyonce, David Foster Wallace and Susan Boyle, describe the saturnine Paul Cezanne as the 'Cool Hand Luke of the Parisian avant garde' ... Filter (s) out all jargon and pretension and filter (s) in plenty of fun ... A richly detailed and highly entertaining history from Delacroix to Damien Hirst ****

Telegraph

Will Gompertz is a natural communicator whose passion for art is expressed with wit and verve

Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate Gallery

Will Gompertz is the best teacher you never had

Guardian