What Are You Looking At?
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  • Published: 13 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241965993
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $29.99

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 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 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 the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask.
  • Published: 13 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241965993
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $29.99
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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.

Also by Will Gompertz

See What You're Missing
Think Like an Artist
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Praise for What Are You Looking At?

Will Gompertz is the best teacher you never had

Will Gompertz

Fascinating, fresh, energetic. A lively train-ride through modern art movements, beginning with Impressionism, ending with Banksy

Scotsman

Highly readable. Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New redone à la Bill Bryson. Filters out all jargon and pretension and filters in plenty of fun. A richly detailed and highly entertaining history from Delacroix to Damien Hirst

Daily Telegraph

Energetic, comprehensive, refreshingly up-to-the-minute

Observer

Gompertz writes about difficult things 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

Rattles along, powered by some astute observations

Sunday Times, Books of the Year