Will Gompertz

I recently finished reading "What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye"" by Will Gompertz, the BBC's arts editor.

I bought it to fill the vacuum left by "The Story of Art" by E.H. Gombrich.  I'd bought a secondhand (cheap) version of that book, published in 1979, which meant that I was missing out on significant developments in the art world since that time.

Interesting that both authors' names start with "Gom" indicating a similar Germanic heritage (Gom meaning man, apparently).

Anyhow, the two books dovetail very nicely - not only because one starts where the other finishes (with a bit of overlap) but also because both authors write well, step through developments chronologically,  stick to analysing masterpieces in a down-to-earth way and avoid the pretentious twaddle used by a lot of art theorists.

By the way, Mary Loveday-Edwards, our Context of Practice lecturer, says I'm wrong to view all art theorists with disdain because some of them, such as Gombrich, don't write in riddles.  But I view Gombrich as an art historian rather than a theorist.   I think you have to have theories to be a theorist and I don't think art can be analysed in such a scientific way.

So, what about Will Gompertz's book?

I was attracted to it in the first place because I'd seen Gompertz on TV and was impressed with his high forehead (brains?).  I admired him for volunteering to do a stand-up comedy show about modern art at  the Edinburgh Fringe.  And the following lines in Amazon's book description looked promising:

Refreshing, irreverent and always straightforward, What Are You Looking At? cuts through the pretentious art speak and asks all the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask.  

Now I've checked out  his minimalist Wikipedia entry I'm also impressed that he didn't take any A-levels and makes a point of telling the world he didn't.

All of this positive stuff has to be set against his former job as "director of Tate Media" which I think means he was in charge of developing the Tate's Web presence.  In my view, this makes him very much one of Art's "in-crowd" - a negative.

I've already gone on about Gompertz's adulation of Marcel Duchamp in previous posts (see "Duchamp" and "Duchamp Take 2") but there's a couple of other things in his book that stick in my mind.

The first one is that he likens interpreting modern art to solving cryptic crosswords;  the more you already know about modern art the deeper you can get in understanding the artist's intentions and the more enjoyment you'll experience.

This is a précis of what Gompertz wrote, not what I think.  Personally,  I can't do cryptic crosswords and I can't be bothered to try and learn how.  And I'm not sure whether I buy the analogy anyhow.  With cryptic crosswords, there is only one right answer and you know when you've found it.  With a piece of modern art, you can speculate about what the artist was trying to communicate and you can examine your own response to it (if you have any).  This is not analogous to solving a crossword; it's just giving you some food for thought.

The other thing that sticks in my mind is Gompertz's analysis of Damien Hirst's work.  He says it's full of references to other artist's work - a veritable monster cryptic crossword (my words.)

I can't help wondering whether Gompertz is giving Hirst too much credit, whether he's reading stuff into his work that wasn't put there deliberately.  At the time it made me think of Life of Brian - a crowd following Brian and interpreting whatever he said as confirmation that he was the Messiah.

Brian: ...Will you please listen? I'm not the Messiah! Do you understand? Honestly! Woman: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity! Brian: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right, I am the Messiah! Crowd: He is! He is the Messiah! Brian: Now, fuck off![Silence] Arthur: How shall we fuck off, oh Lord? Brian: Oh, just go away! Leave me alone!

Maybe it doesn't matter?  Maybe the references reflect Hirst's subconscious and that's what Gompertz finds so enthralling?

Something like this happened to me on the "Making Waves" project in Plymouth.  My "Smitten" design, see below, was one of the winners in a competition to decorate some giant fibreglass sunfish forming a tourist trail.  The designs were supposed to have a reference to Plymouth in them, mine being a play on Smeaton's tower on the Hoe,  a symbol of the city.

 Long after I won the commission a fellow student remarked that it was in the style of Beryl Cook, who lived in Plymouth.   Another reference to the city!  From then on, of course, I was happy for people to assume it was deliberate.