Narrator: In 1972, the Tate Gallery in London purchased a sculpture by the Minimalist artist Carl Andre. The piece, titled 'Equivalent VIII,' consisted of 120 firebricks, neatly arranged in a two-by-sixty rectangle. When the British press discovered that public money had been spent on what they saw as a simple pile of bricks, the reaction was one of pure outrage. Headlines screamed, "Wasting our national cash!" and even the highbrow art periodical The Burlington Magazine asked, "Has the Tate gone mad?" Yet, just a few decades later, the same institution acquired an artwork by Roman Ondák that was nothing more than a set of instructions for hiring actors to form a queue. This time, there was no scandal, no public outcry. What changed? How did the art world move from revering technical skill to valuing a pile of bricks and a set of instructions? In his book, What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art, author and art editor Will Gompertz provides a chronological map, arguing that modern art is not a series of random, incomprehensible jokes, but a logical, evolving story of rebellion, new ideas, and radical shifts in how we see the world.

Narrator: For centuries, the art world was dominated by powerful institutions like the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which dictated what proper art should be: grand historical, mythological, or religious scenes, executed with flawless, invisible brushwork. But in the mid-19th century, a group of artists began to rebel. At the forefront was Édouard Manet, a reluctant revolutionary who nonetheless shattered the old rules. His 1863 painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, caused an immense scandal. It depicted two fully clothed modern gentlemen having a picnic with a completely naked woman, who stared brazenly out at the viewer. It was not the nudity that was shocking—the Salon was full of nudes—but the context. This was not a timeless goddess; this was a contemporary Parisian woman, and the scene felt uncomfortably real. Two years later, his painting Olympia, a portrait of a high-class prostitute staring down the viewer from her bed, caused an even greater uproar. Manet and his contemporaries, who would become known as the Impressionists, were no longer interested in painting the past. They were painting the fleeting, messy, and vibrant reality of modern life, using visible brushstrokes to capture a moment in time. This was the first great rupture, a defiant turn away from the idealized past toward the complex present.

Narrator: If Impressionism changed what artists painted, Dadaism changed what art could even be. The pivotal moment came in 1917, when the artist Marcel Duchamp took an ordinary, mass-produced porcelain urinal, turned it on its back, signed it with the pseudonym "R. Mutt," and submitted it to an art exhibition under the title Fountain. The exhibition committee, which had promised to display any work submitted by a member, was horrified and hid the piece. But Duchamp’s act was a philosophical bombshell. He argued that art was not about the artist’s technical skill or the beauty of the object. The art was in the idea. By choosing an object, removing it from its functional purpose, and giving it a new title and context, the artist transformed it into a work of art. This concept, which he called a "readymade," proposed that art could be anything, so long as the artist said so. This single act laid the groundwork for Conceptual Art and fundamentally shifted the focus of the art world from the physical object to the intellectual concept behind it.

Narrator: As the 20th century dawned, artists began to look beyond the visible world, seeking to represent deeper, unseen realities. This quest took several forms. Paul Cézanne, considered the "father of us all" by Picasso, sought to paint not just a fleeting impression, but the underlying structure and permanence of what he saw, famously advising artists to "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." His deconstruction of objects into geometric forms paved the way for Cubism. Meanwhile, Wassily Kandinsky embarked on a spiritual quest. He believed that colors and shapes could evoke emotions and sounds, much like a musical composition. He aimed to create a pure, abstract art that could communicate directly with the soul, free from the constraints of representing the physical world. The Surrealists, led by André Breton and heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, took a different path inward. They explored the bizarre, irrational landscape of the unconscious mind. Artists like Salvador Dalí painted their "dream photographs" with hyper-realistic detail, aiming to "systematize confusion" and make the unreal feel terrifyingly real.

Narrator: In the turbulent years following World War I, several movements emerged that believed art could do more than just reflect the world—it could actively redesign it. In Russia, the revolution fueled two parallel movements. Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism sought a new spiritual reality through pure geometric abstraction, famously expressed in his Black Square, which he called the "zero of form." In contrast, Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivism argued that artists should be technicians, using industrial materials to serve the revolution by designing everything from posters to buildings. In the Netherlands, Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl movement sought universal harmony through a radically simplified visual language of primary colors and a grid of horizontal and vertical lines. They believed this aesthetic could bring order and balance not just to painting, but to architecture and design. This utopian impulse found its most famous expression in Germany’s Bauhaus school. Founded by Walter Gropius, its mission was to erase the line between artist and craftsman and to unify art and technology, creating beautiful, functional, and mass-producible designs for a new, more civilized society.

Narrator: After the high-minded seriousness of Abstract Expressionism in post-war America, a new generation of artists turned their gaze away from their inner turmoil and toward the world around them: a world of advertising, celebrity culture, and mass-produced consumer goods. This was Pop Art. In New York, Andy Warhol became its high priest. He famously painted Campbell's Soup Cans and silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe, not to celebrate them, but to hold up a mirror to a society where everything, from soup to celebrities, was a packaged commodity. Robert Rauschenberg created his "Combines," merging painting with found objects like tires, street signs, and even a stuffed goat, literally working in what he called the "gap between art and life." Pop Art was cool, detached, and ironic, and it decisively blurred the lines between "high art" and "low culture," arguing that there was as much to be said about a Coke bottle as a classical sculpture.

Narrator: By the 1960s, some artists felt that art had become too much about personality and narrative. The Minimalists sought to strip art down to its bare essentials. This brings us back to Carl Andre's bricks. Minimalist artists used industrial materials like bricks, steel, and fluorescent lights to create simple, geometric forms. Their goal was to create objects that were nothing more than what they were. There was no hidden meaning, no story, no emotion. The art was about the object's relationship to the space it occupied and the viewer's physical experience of it. This idea was pushed even further by Conceptual artists. For them, the physical object could disappear entirely. Sol LeWitt, for example, created "wall drawings" that were simply a set of written instructions. The museum or collector would buy the instructions, and a team of drafters would execute the work. For LeWitt, the finished drawing was just one manifestation of the real art, which was the idea itself.

Narrator: The late 20th century saw the rise of the artist as an entrepreneur. In Britain, a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) took this to a new level. Led by figures like Damien Hirst, they were savvy, provocative, and brilliant at manipulating the media. Hirst’s infamous work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde—was a perfect symbol of the era. It was a spectacle, a brand, and a multi-million-dollar commodity. Hirst bypassed the traditional gallery system, eventually holding his own record-breaking auction at Sotheby's in 2008, selling over 200 new works directly to collectors for more than £100 million. This event marked the culmination of a period where art became inextricably linked with big business, and the artist’s persona and brand were as crucial to their success as the work itself.

Narrator: The journey through 150 years of modern art, as charted by Will Gompertz, reveals that it is not a chaotic mess but a coherent, if often contentious, conversation. The single most important takeaway is that each artistic movement is a direct reaction to what came before, driven by profound shifts in technology, politics, and philosophy. From the Impressionists’ rebellion against the Academy to the YBAs’ embrace of the market, artists have consistently questioned the world and the very nature of art itself.

The book ultimately challenges us to change the question we ask. Instead of standing before a work and asking, "But is it art?", we are encouraged to ask, "What is it trying to say, and why?" By understanding the context, we can move from being intimidated outsiders to informed participants in one of history's most dynamic and revealing dialogues. The real challenge is not to accept a pile of bricks as art, but to understand the revolutionary idea that put them there.