Speaker

2023 - See What You're Missing: 31 Ways Artists Notice the World – and How You Can Too

Artists have learnt to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

In his typical engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists – from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world – to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.

In See What You’re Missing, we learn, for example, how Hasegawa Tohaku can help us to see beauty, how David Hockney helps us to see colour and how Frida Kahlo can help us see pain. In doing so we come to know the exhilarating feeling of being truly alive.

Will Gompertz is a world-leading expert in the arts. Having spent seven years as a Director of the Tate Galleries followed by eleven years as the BBC’s Arts Editor, he is now Artistic Director at the Barbican Theatre. Will has interviewed and observed many of the world’s leading artists, actors, writers, musicians, and directors. Creativity magazine in New York ranked him as one of the fifty most original thinkers in the world. He is the author of the internationally bestselling What Are You Looking At? and Think Like an Artist. Will lives in London.