The Pursuit of Art

In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, I have travelled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. My journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications as well as serendipitous encounters, conversations and outcomes.

In The Pursuit of Art, I recount journeys to see (amongst others) Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania, prehistoric cave art in France, the museum island of Naoshima in Japan, the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and Anselm Kiefer’s extraordinary ‘underworld’ at Barjac, France. Interwoven with these tales are other journeys, to meet artists – Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, Marina Abramović ́in Venice and Robert Rauschenberg in New York, for example – or to travel with them, such as being with Gilbert & George in Beijing, seeing Roni Horn and her work in
Iceland. These encounters not only provide insights into the way artists approach and think about their art, but also reveal the importance of their personal environments. And in the process, I discuss how these meetings impact on his own evolving ideas and tastes.