Will Gompertz makes art accessible to everyone, simply by talking about it contagiously

“I was completely blown off my socks.” Will Gompertz, museum director, writer and speaker, remembers well how his love for modern art kindled out of nowhere thirty years ago. It happened in Amsterdam, during a city trip with his brand new girlfriend: ‘She wanted to go to the Stedelijk Museum. I found modern art boring, but I liked her so I did my best. In a room I saw the painting Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point by Willem de Kooning. It was music, like a chord being struck in my head.’

Gompertz (57) is back in the Netherlands this week. On Friday, he will give the Joost Zwagerman Lecture 2022 at the TAQA Theater De Vest in Alkmaar. Every year, an internationally renowned writer, journalist or artist is invited to speak on 18 November, the birthday of writer Joost Zwagerman (1963-2015), about importance of art and literature. Gompertz is also known as ‘the art-historical stand-up comedian’ thanks to his infectious performances, and his lecture promises to be a fiery and entertaining plea for art.

Say yes to art

The Englishman has an impressive track record in the art world and journalism. Things moved quickly after his ‘meeting Willem de Kooning’: he became an art editor at the BBC and worked for seven years at the Tate Gallery, one of London’s most important museums. Last year he became director of the Barbican Center in London, one of the largest art centers in the world, with space for concerts, performances and exhibitions. In 2008 he passed Creativity Magazine New York chosen as one of the fifty most creative people in the world. In the Netherlands he is best known for his international bestsellers So can my little sister (2012) and Think like an artist (2016).

‘The title of my lecture will be Yes To Art,” says Gompertz. Although we video call, the permanent twinkle in his eye is clearly visible. ‘I recently spoke to a Turkish director and actor and he told me about a campaign called that. It sounded nice and positive, I thought. I don’t know exactly how it is in the Netherlands, but in the UK people often talk about art as if it has nothing to do with everyday life and is only for the elite. While art is about life! And we can learn a lot from artists.’

One of the things we can learn from artists is to look closely. “For a species with such excellent eyesight, we’re astonishingly bad at that. We do a lot of things on autopilot and miss a lot of things.’ That’s partly because we spend all day looking at our phones: ‘A comet could fly by and we’d totally miss it because of those screens. More importantly, most people simply never learned. Artists do, they are trained in it.’ In his new book See What You’re Missing which comes out in February, Gompertz therefore shows how you can look more attentively at the world through the eyes of an artist.

‘A contemporary painter like David Hockney can completely change your view of nature. He has made a series of beautiful paintings of the English landscape in bright colors such as yellow, turquoise, orange and purple. How did you come up with using such colors, I once asked him. We are talking about the English landscape here. They are real, he replied. After that conversation I went to look at the places where he made those paintings and damn: he was right. Without him I would never have seen those colors.’

Everyday art viewers

That’s what artists do, says Gompertz: they help you pay more attention. ‘And if you pay more attention, your senses are on edge. You feel more stimulated and feel more alive.’ Yet many people feel that art is not something for them. ‘Millions of people go to museums every year, but almost everyone I speak to says: I know nothing about art,’ writes Gompertz in So can my little sister. What is his message for people who find art intimidating?

‘I would say to them: Yes to art, yes to art. Everyone can appreciate art and find something valuable in it.’ Perhaps not always on their own, but certainly with the help of a good guide: ‘Experts, including art experts, are wrongly increasingly mistrusted in our time. If you trust that there is a reason why someone who knows a lot about it selects a piece of art, you can relax and think: okay, there’s something interesting here, I just have to find out what it is.’

Unfortunately, not all art experts are equally good at communicating what that ‘something’ is, which still leaves people feeling left out. ‘That’s right’, says Gompertz, ‘many art experts are academics, and they write and talk less accessible. I’m trying to close that gap. I listen carefully to the experts and try to write down their arguments in a way that is understandable to people like myself, everyday art viewers.’