Michael Prodger
From Marcel to Damien
What Are You Looking At? 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye
By Will Gompertz
Viking 426pp £20 order from our bookshop
According to Will Gompertz, the BBC’s arts editor and Professor Pat Pending from Wacky Races look-alike: ‘It’s a fact of life: rock stars trash hotels; sportsmen and women get injured; arts folk talk bollocks.’ He has a point: modern art has an unrivalled capacity to bring out the prolixity and bilge in those who write about it, and Gompertz is honest enough to admit to indulging in occasional bouts of testicle talk himself. Perhaps as a result he has written What Are You Looking At?, a primer to modern art, in a determinedly demotic style.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.