We don’t know what we’re looking at or how to look at it and yet we are asked to treat it with a great deal of seriousness and respect. There we are, surrounded by objects and images that are alternately baffling, confusing, random, bizarre, boring, interesting, ugly, beautiful, or any combination of the above. I love this story because it neatly encapsulates how so many of us feel in museums dedicated to modern art.

Me and the other visitor looked at each other and laughed.

Then all of the sudden the wall opened and a man walked out. There was this other visitor, who started looking at it too. So I bent down and started to look at it. I walked in one room and I saw this thing on the wall, and it looked really weird. So I was in the Museum of Modern Art one day, you know, walking around and stuff. My favorite story about modern art comes from my friend. The only thing wrong with this book is that Mr Hughes didn’t do an even more expanded and updated version before he died in 2012. I opened at random and my eye fell on p 382:ĭuchamp invented a category he called “infra-mince”, “sub-tiny” it was occupied, for instance, by the difference in weight between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once. He moves the story forward in several broad themes – how art confronts or is absorbed by power what architecture thinks it’s doing to us the interior landscapes of art like surrealism and abstraction and how art has lost any kind of plot it thought it might have had, and if that might be a good thing. This book is the 1991 expanded version of the 1980 book-of-the-TV-series. “Machines were the ideal metaphor for that central pornographic fantasy of the 19th century, rape followed by gratitude.” “To make ‘socialist’ art, one must stop depicting ownable things: in short, go abstract.” “The idea that fascism always preferred retrograde to advanced art is simply a myth.” “Mass media took away the political speech of art.” In cubist paintings the world was “a twitching skin of nuances”. The phonograph was “the most radical extension of cultural memory since the photograph”. Viewing Paris from the Eiffel Tower in 1889 was “one of the pivots in human consciousness”. It’s stuffed full of ideas and sentences that refresh like a splash of seaspray. I think it’s the best single art book I’ve read. Again today I was lost in admiration of this history-with-attitude of 20th century art.

Robert hughes the shock of the new