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

Description

For the sceptics, the art lovers, and the five 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. You will learn- not all conceptual art is bollocks; Picasso is king (but Cezanne 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 the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask.

As the BBC's Arts Editor, Will Gompertz 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.

Will Gompertz is the best teacher you never had * Guardian * Gompertz has written an energetic and comprehensive romp through modern art -- Independent 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 * Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New redone a la Bill Bryson ... few are the histories of modern art that name check Beyonce, David Foster Wallace and Susan Boyle, or describe the saturnine Paul Cezanne as the 'Cool Hand Luke of the Parisian avant garde' ... Filters out all jargon and pretension and filters in plenty of fun ... A richly detailed and highly entertaining history from Delacroix to Damien Hirst **** * Telegraph * Gompertz writes about difficult things - the birth of conceptualism, the link between the pyramidal compositions of Gericault'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 * 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 *