ART HISTORY like his subway map, his history is decidedly

Anglocentric (there are no Actionists and no

What Are You Situationists, for example, while South

America and Africa remain relatively foreign

Looking At?
countries to Will). That’s not to say that
everything is awful (although this book is home
to one of the most superficial accounts –

150 Years of
everything is form, nothing is content – of
Modernism I’ve ever read): you have to admire
Will’s persistent (if standard) stitching of one

Modern Art
style to the next and his dogged insistence that,
when it comes to art, the past need not be as
foreign a country as actual foreign countries

in the Blink
CULTURAL THEORY
evidently are to him. If you want something

Sad,
new, insightful or revolutionary, however,
there’s nothing much here.

of an Eye MARK RAPPOLT

Depressed,
By Will Gompertz
Penguin, £20 (flexicover) People
Will Gompertz is the BBC’s arts editor. He’s a By David Horvitz
communicator. And in his new book he wants
New Documents, $25/€20 (hardcover)
to answer this question: ‘Why has modern and
contemporary art gone from being widely seen
as a bad joke to something that is respected David Horvitz, an artist now well
and revered around the world?’ For Gompertz, established for carving little slices out of
art is about understanding, not judging, so the the Internet and sculpting them into his
answer lies in knowing where all this trendy art largely ephemeral practice, has created a
came from – art history. Being a communicator, book consisting of stock photographs of
he wants to guide us through that history in a people found by typing the words ‘sad’,
fun and accessible way that bypasses the ‘depressed’ and ‘people’ into the search
‘bollocks’ that most insiders deploy when they field for stock photography companies
talk about art. So no footnotes, and lots of
such as Getty and Corbis. The stock
passages about what he assumes artists were
image, ‘the empty signifier waiting to be
thinking and saying when they were at work.
Gompertz’s plan is simple: to take us from one filled with content’, as the book’s
of art’s -isms to the next as if they were stops on introduction describes it, has become an
a subway map (he provides us with a area of interest for several artists in recent
bastardised version of London’s, in which the years – among them Horvitz, Aleksandra
major stops are those -isms and the minor ones Domanovic, Rachel Reupke, Oliver Laric
the artists associated with them, just in case we and Nina Beier – perhaps because the
don’t get it) and he the train. So it’s ‘all aboard’ speculative photographers who produce
at Delacroix and ‘train terminates here’ at these images, waiting for the right
Banksy. So far, so good. moment to be financially rewarded for
The trouble is that, as a writer, Will is
their use of cliché, must keep up with the
not really up to delivering on his promise. He’s
concerns of the day: pictures of bankers
like a tweedy dad who embarrassingly tries to
make everything cool by telling you it’s ‘rock with their heads in their hands shadowed
’n’ roll’ and sticking two thumbs up. In one us through the most hysterical moments
clumsy attempt to make Picasso’s Les of the financial crisis in 2008, while
Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) more up-to-date, companies regularly employ stock
he describes the women as being ready to photography to market and advertise
‘jump out from the canvas like a scene frozen themselves. In addition to the grainy
in a 3-D movie’. Following it up awkwardly images of people looking sad in various
with: ‘This was the artist’s intention.’ situations and a list of the tags that
Describing the Flatiron Building, he comes up accompanied these photographs in the
with this nonsense: it’s ‘an enormous concrete
image archives, often creepily specific in
slice of cheese’. So which is it – concrete or
nature: ‘rejection’, ‘waist up’, ‘well-
cheese? And that kind of confusion continues:
in one chapter the author asserts that dressed’, ‘grief’, ‘bangs’ and
Mondrian’s success is demonstrated by the fact ‘wristwatch’…, the book includes a
that his work is so popular it can now be found glossary with small, ruminative entries on
on iPhone covers; in another, the fact that ‘Prozac’, ‘ImageTracker™’ and ‘Suicide’.
Carsten Höller’s slides at Tate Modern are
‘audience-friendly’ makes them something we LAURA MCLEAN-FERRIS
should sniffily describe as ‘artertainment’.
(Yes, given his stated mission, Will is definitely
missing the irony here.) And while we’re at it,

ArtReview 145