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¿Qué Estás Mirando?: 150 Años De Arte Moderno En Un Abrir Y Cerrar De Ojos (2012)

by Will Gompertz(Favorite Author)

4.1 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Taurus

review 1: I studied three years of art at my secondary school during the eighties in Spain. As the subject included a lot of material and as the way we were taught was quite classical, we studied from the painting at Altamira & Lascaux caves to the twentieth century art, but we could never go scarcely further than Picasso or Dali, if we managed to get so far. Therefore, I always felt that there was a huge gap on my knowledge and understanding of contemporary art and that somehow I was missing the point. That is why, when I started reading Gompertz's book a couple of years ago, I really enjoyed it, as it is written in simple, but not simplistic, down-to-earth way. So it gave me that eureka feeling, as I had finally found a book that made me start to make sense of and value the conte... moremporary art. In spite of its many differences in style, scope and focus, somehow this book could be considered as the sequel to Gombrich's A Story of Art, as they make you understand what the artists had in their minds when creating their works and how these works are conciously or unconciously linked to and influenced by the life and times an artist is living in.
review 2: The main thing wrong with this book is that it doesn't provide illustrations for all the visuals it is describing. And not much else is.I thoroughly enjoyed this romp through a brief history of modern art, about which I know precious little. I found it engaging from the off and it drags you along with it as compellingly as a good crime novel, whilst doing a reasonable job of convincing that modern art is not a criminal con. Gompertz' embroidery of artists' conversations is not overdone, he makes his case accessibility and without snobbery. I hope that his term for Hirst and Emin era art catches on, and I really like his description of conceptual art as like a cryptic crossword, with much of the appreciation in the de-coding. (I can understand the appeal of cryptic crosswords but do not necessarily wish to grapple with them myself) less

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