Will Gompertz at Cheltenham Literature Festival 5th October 2012

‘150 Years of Modern Art’

“Cubism isn’t really about cubes” exclaims Will Gompertz from the stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. He reaches for a cardboard box he’s hidden behind the lectern which he then unfolds flat. “It’s about showing all the sides of an object at once.”

Gompertz has been described as “the best teacher you never had” by The Guardian and I’d have to agree. Along with the cardboard box trick, he brought his book alive by asking three members of the audience to act it out as he was reading. He read an account of the day that Duchamp acquired his infamous urinal.

Whilst laughing at his stumbling ‘actors’ on stage, I couldn’t help noticing how unpretentious and easy to understand Gompertz’ writing style was. After years of struggling through art history books with a well-thumbed dictionary at my side, I relish the prospect of reading a comprehensible account of modern art!

Gompertz expressed theories that I hadn’t previously considered; he suggested that Duchamp stole his idea for ‘ready-mades’ from Picasso, who had placed cheap materials from the hardware store into his collages, thus transforming cheap materials into high art.

He also described the difference between the philosophies of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. The former is based on the Freudian ideas of the individual subconscious, whereas the latter takes its inspiration from the Jungian theory of the group consciousness. In this way the Abstract Expressionists were aiming to reach out to their audience and let them feel pure emotion whilst looking at their paintings, instead of projecting strange worlds loaded with symbolic meaning to decode. Gompertz says that for him, that is what makes good art.

Carrying on from the philosophies behind Abstract Expressionism, Gompertz finished with a favourite quote from Rothko: “lonely people can look at my paintings and know that they’re not alone”.

In the question and answer session Gompertz was asked: “What is art and what is not?” To which he replied, “In simple terms art is anything that does not have a function, an iPhone is not a work of art, because it has a function.” He went on to explain that taste is a different matter.

A curator from Bristol Art Gallery asked: “What, in your opinion, is a dynamic modern art gallery?” Gompertz replied “Britain has many great modern art galleries, but I feel that they are missing a trick. The curators and dealers are so concerned with flattering artists, especially those that are still alive, to increase prices that we have lost true subjectivity. What I’d like to see is a brave curator go to the Tate Collection and pick out artworks that they dislike and put on an exhibition of ‘bad art’ to provoke honest discussion. Perhaps the reason why no one has done it is because the only person who has was Hitler!”

A suitably controversial note to end.