THANK YOU WILL GOMPERTZ.

I loved the book, What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art, by Will Gompertz. I learned so much. It gave me a new view on the subject. It made me realise I’m more interested in the history of modern art than modern art itself.
    I love much modern stuff - dammit, you can’t dislike Guernica - even if it is as kitsch as Old Mother Riley. But you can dislike much subsequent work, especially the ‘three eyes and a kipper on the head’ school that followed Picasso.
  Mr Gompertz explains one of the objectives of modern work was to humble the existing establishment. That became its failure. The new became the establishment, and instead of being demolished, the opposite happened. The establishment constantly recycled itself and boomed. Art, with a capital a, A for anything goes, is now everywhere. Some modern work is wonderful. Some isn’t. It was ever thus. The inexplicable is now the norm. Private Eye gave up satirising it years ago.
It’s not that I didn’t give the new a chance. I went to the Guggenheim show at the Tate in 1965. I looked at the plain white and plain black canvases of Ad Reinhardt (?) and didn’t ‘get it’. Only gradually did it dawn on me the subject of this art was art itself. I think that’s when my interest in ‘the new’ began to wobble and my interest in the traditional began to grow. Thank you, WG, your book has graced my reading. It has been a gateway to a new viewpoint.