Rachel: Okay, Justine. Quick-fire round. I say 'modern art,' you say the first thing that comes to mind. Justine: A banana taped to a wall. And a hefty price tag. And a deep sense of 'Am I the only one who doesn't get it?' Rachel: That is the perfect answer. And it’s exactly the feeling that our book for today tackles head-on. We're diving into What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art by Will Gompertz. Justine: I love that title. It’s the question everyone is silently screaming inside the museum. Rachel: Exactly. And Gompertz is the perfect person to answer it. He’s not just some academic; he was the Arts Editor for the BBC and a director at the Tate Galleries in London. He has this incredible insider-outsider perspective that lets him cut through all the pretentious jargon. The book is widely acclaimed for being witty, accessible, and just plain fun, which is not something you usually say about art history. Justine: Okay, so if he's an insider, he must have an explanation for... well, for things like a pile of bricks being treated as a masterpiece. Because that’s where you lose me. Rachel: Oh, the bricks. That’s exactly where our story begins. It’s a moment that perfectly captures this massive disconnect between the art world and, well, everyone else.

Justine: I’m so glad you brought up the bricks. I feel like it’s the poster child for confusing modern art. What was the actual story there? Rachel: It’s a fantastic one. So, in 1972, the Tate Gallery in London, a major national institution, used public money to buy a sculpture by an American Minimalist artist named Carl Andre. The piece was called 'Equivalent VIII'. Justine: Let me guess, it was a pile of bricks. Rachel: It was, in fact, a very orderly, rectangular arrangement of 120 firebricks. And when the British press found out a few years later, they went absolutely ballistic. The headlines were brutal. One newspaper screamed, "Wasting our national cash on a pile of bricks!" Even the highbrow art magazines were baffled. The Burlington Magazine literally asked, "Has the Tate gone mad?" Justine: I mean, I get it. If you tell someone you spent thousands of pounds of their tax money on something they could get at a hardware store, they’re going to be upset. It feels like a joke at their expense. Rachel: It absolutely does. And that was the prevailing feeling for a long time. Modern art was seen as this elaborate prank played by elites on the general public. But here’s where the story gets interesting. Fast forward about thirty years. The same Tate Gallery acquires another piece of art. This one is by a Slovakian artist, Roman Ondák. Justine: Okay, what was it this time? A neatly stacked pile of two-by-fours? Rachel: Even better. The artwork was just a set of instructions. The instructions were for the gallery to hire actors to form a line, a queue, for no reason. They would just stand there, patiently waiting for nothing, and other gallery visitors would get intrigued and maybe even join the line. Justine: You have got to be kidding me. A fake queue? What was the reaction to that? Surely people lost their minds. Rachel: That’s the twist. There was no reaction. No outrage, no angry headlines. A few articles, maybe, but mostly, the public just accepted it. It was seen as interesting, thought-provoking. So the question Gompertz poses is: what happened in those 30 years? How did we go from national outrage over bricks to a collective shrug at a fake queue? Justine: That is a good question. Did we all just get used to the weirdness? Rachel: That’s part of it, but Gompertz points to a few key things. First, a massive influx of money. State funding for the arts exploded, but more importantly, a new class of global super-rich emerged. They needed somewhere to put their money, and modern art became a hot new asset class. It wasn't just art anymore; it was an investment. Justine: Ah, so it’s not about the bricks, it’s about the brand. The value isn't in the object, but in the name attached to it and its potential for resale. Rachel: Precisely. And alongside that, a new audience was created. Glossy magazines and newspaper supplements started covering the art world like it was Hollywood. Suddenly, art was trendy, it was cool. The audience was younger, more cosmopolitan, and they were bored with old paintings of historical figures. They wanted art that reflected their time. Justine: So the art didn't just change, the audience and the entire ecosystem around it changed. The outrage died down because the context was completely different. Rachel: Exactly. But to really understand why an artist would even think to put a pile of bricks in a gallery in the first place, we have to go back even further. The shift wasn't just about money or trends. The artists themselves had completely rewritten the rules of the game decades earlier. And it all goes back to one man and… a urinal.

Justine: Okay, the urinal. I've heard of this. This is Marcel Duchamp, right? This feels like the ultimate "my kid could do that" piece of art. Rachel: It is! And that's exactly the point Duchamp wanted to make. The story is incredible. It’s 1917, New York. Duchamp goes with a couple of wealthy friends to a plumbing supply store, J. L. Mott Iron Works. While his friends are giggling in the corner, he very seriously inspects the bathroom fixtures. He selects a standard, mass-produced porcelain urinal, a Bedfordshire model. Justine: He just... buys a urinal. Rachel: He has his friend buy it. Then he takes it back to his studio, turns it on its back, signs it with a fake name, 'R. Mutt, 1917,' and titles it 'Fountain.' He then submits it to an art exhibition. Now, this exhibition was organized by the Society of Independent Artists, whose whole philosophy was "no jury, no prizes." If you paid your fee, you could show your work. Justine: Let me guess. They didn't show it. Rachel: They did not. The board was horrified. They said it was vulgar, immoral, that it was plagiarism since he didn't make it. They hid it behind a screen. In protest, Duchamp and his wealthy patron resigned from the board. Justine: So he was basically a troll, but a philosophical one? He was hacking the art system to expose its hypocrisy. Rachel: That’s a perfect way to put it. He was conducting an experiment. He wanted to see if this supposedly open-minded, progressive art society would really accept anything. They didn't. But in doing so, Duchamp made his point. He argued that art isn't about the artist's technical skill or the beauty of the object. As Gompertz puts it, Duchamp believed "the art is in the idea, not the object." Justine: That’s a huge shift. It’s taking art from a craft, like woodworking or pottery, and turning it into a philosophy. Rachel: It's a complete revolution. He called these objects "readymades." He invented a new form of sculpture where the artist simply chooses an object, removes it from its functional purpose, gives it a new name and a new context, and by doing so, turns it into art. In essence, he was saying art could be anything, as long as the artist said so. That idea is the foundation for almost all conceptual art that follows. Justine: Okay, that makes a strange kind of sense. But not all modern art is a urinal or a pile of bricks. What about the painters? I’m thinking of someone like Cézanne. His work is weird, but it's still painting. How does he fit into this revolution of the idea? Rachel: That's a great question, because Cézanne's revolution was much quieter, but just as profound. He wasn't a showman like Duchamp. He was a grumpy, solitary figure who just wanted to paint things as he truly saw them. He famously said his greatest aspiration was "certainty." Justine: Certainty? What does that even mean for a painter? Rachel: He felt that traditional art, and even Impressionism, was based on a lie. Artists painted from a single, fixed perspective, as if they were looking through one eye, like a camera. But that’s not how we see. We have two eyes. We move our head. Our brain stitches together multiple viewpoints to understand an object in space. Cézanne wanted to paint that process. Justine: So he was trying to paint binocular vision? Rachel: Exactly! The artist David Hockney said Cézanne "was the first artist to paint using two eyes." If you look at his still lifes, a jug might be painted from two slightly different angles at once. A tabletop might be tilted towards you so you can see what's on it. It looks 'wrong' or 'wonky' by traditional standards, but he's giving you more visual information, a truer experience of seeing. Justine: And he's the one who said to "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone," right? Rachel: That's him. He was breaking the world down into its fundamental geometric shapes. He wasn't painting a tree; he was painting the idea of a tree, its essential structure. Both he and Duchamp, in their own ways, were telling the world that art's job was no longer to just copy reality. Its job was to investigate it, to take it apart, and to present a new way of thinking about it. Justine: Wow. Okay, so Duchamp and Cézanne basically kicked the door open and said art can be anything, and it's the concept that matters. What came rushing through that door?

Rachel: A whole lot. Once the idea became the most important thing, artists were free to explore everything. And they went in some very different directions. On one hand, you had the anarchists and the dreamers. Justine: That sounds like fun. Who were they? Rachel: Think of the Dadaists, who were direct descendants of Duchamp. They emerged during the horror of World War I, and they looked at the world, which was supposedly built on reason and logic, and saw only carnage. So they embraced the opposite: nonsense, absurdity, and chance. They wrote poems by pulling words out of a hat. They were anti-art, anti-logic, anti-everything. Justine: A rebellion against sense itself. Rachel: And right after them came the Surrealists, led by André Breton. They were obsessed with Sigmund Freud and the power of the unconscious mind. They wanted to unlock the secrets of dreams and madness. Artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte painted hyper-realistic scenes of impossible things, trying to make the viewer's own reality feel unstable. Picasso, in a painting like 'The Three Dancers,' used this new visual freedom to express his own personal tragedy and grief in a way that a realistic painting never could. Justine: So that's one path: art as a way to explore the inner world, the chaotic, the irrational. What was the other path? Rachel: The other path was much more worldly. It was about art's role in society. In Russia, after the revolution, you had the Constructivists. They believed artists should be like engineers, using their skills to build a new world. They designed propaganda posters, furniture, buildings—art had to be useful to the state. Justine: That sounds intense. From personal dreams to state-sponsored design. Rachel: It's a huge leap. But the most dominant path, especially after World War II, was the one that led directly to the art market we know today. It was the path of the entrepreneur. And this is where the irony comes in. Justine: I'm ready for it. Rachel: The artists who were most successful in this new world were the ones who best understood Duchamp's lesson: that art is about the idea, and the context. Think of Andy Warhol. What is a can of Campbell's Soup? It's a mass-produced, everyday object. A "readymade." Warhol didn't paint one can; he screen-printed 32 of them, exactly the same, and displayed them like they were on a supermarket shelf. He took Duchamp's idea and applied it to consumer culture. Justine: He wasn't just making art; he was commenting on mass production by using mass production. Rachel: Precisely. And then you get to the Young British Artists, or YBAs, in the 1990s. People like Damien Hirst. Hirst famously said his generation "didn’t have any shame about stealing other people’s ideas." He took Duchamp's readymade, Warhol's commercialism, and the Surrealists' shock value, and he packaged it all into a brand. His shark in a tank, 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,' is the ultimate expression of this. It's a shocking idea, brilliantly executed and marketed. Justine: Wow. So the anti-art guys who wanted to tear down the system accidentally wrote the playbook for the super-commercial artists who basically became the system? That's incredibly ironic. Rachel: It's the central story of modern art. The rebellion became a business model. Gompertz ends the book discussing Hirst's 2008 auction at Sotheby's, where he bypassed his dealers and sold his work directly, making over a hundred million pounds. It happened on the very same day the Lehman Brothers bank collapsed, triggering the global financial crisis. It was the peak of the artist as an entrepreneur, and the end of an era.

Justine: So, after all this, what are we looking at? Has the book answered its own question? Rachel: I think Gompertz's answer is that we're looking at a story. A 150-year story of rebellion, ideas, and money. The art itself—the bricks, the urinal, the shark—is just a single chapter in that much bigger narrative. The real masterpiece is the evolution of the idea of 'art' itself. Justine: That makes so much sense. It’s not about judging whether the bricks are 'good' art. It’s about understanding the historical and philosophical journey that led to someone in 1972 thinking that putting a pile of bricks in a gallery was a valid and important artistic statement. Rachel: Exactly. The value isn't in the object; it's in the conversation that object starts. It’s in the questions it forces us to ask about what art is, who it's for, and what it's supposed to do. Gompertz gives us the context to be part of that conversation, instead of just standing on the outside feeling confused. Justine: It’s empowering, in a way. It gives you the tools to look at that banana taped to the wall and not just dismiss it, but to ask, "Okay, what's the idea here? What story is this trying to tell about our culture right now?" Rachel: And that's the real takeaway. The book isn't just about art; it's about learning to see the world differently, to question the value we place on things, and to find meaning in the most unexpected places. It makes you wonder, what everyday object from our lives today could end up in a museum in 50 years, and what would it say about us? Justine: That's a great question. A discarded smartphone? A collection of Amazon boxes? We'd love to hear your thoughts. What's the most confusing piece of modern art you've ever seen, and what do you think it was trying to say? Let us know on our socials. Rachel: This is Aibrary, signing off.