The Imaginary Museum

Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary, imaginary museum. Stand in front of some of the most incomprehensible art works in the world with an expert guide by your side, full of personal stories, expertise and human understanding.

In a stunningly original memoir and art guide we find ourselves among outrageous artworks, and we return again and again to the same question:
 
“But what does it mean?”

With the help of a cast of critics, guards, curators, artists, protestors and ghosts, Eastham explores the idea that the value of art is not to be found in what it means, but in what it does to you.
 
This is an argument to forget about what is and is not art and to instead think courageously and creatively about how things really make you feel. You don’t have to like the art works in this or any gallery, you don’t have to fully understand them either, but we can benefit from existing alongside them. And in doing so we learn about ourselves, and each other.

CORE TARGET AUDIENCE OF art-lovers and regular gallery visitors. The book is structured around the idea of an imaginary museum which the author describes, fills with the art works of his choosing, and then guides us through. It is a book to help demystify modern art for people who find it unapproachable. It also increases and deepens the readers' confidence in thinking and talking about modern art and what we see in general.
 
CROSSOVER APPEAL: The book is a cross between a modern art guide and a memoir. The author brings much of his own life as an art critic into the museum; the works he has seen and the people he has met all over the world. A central idea of the book is that when we talk about art, we are beginning to talk about ourselves. The value is in the way that you look at something as much as what you look at.
  
THE AUTHOR set up The White Review with the founder of Fitzcarraldo Editions. He is now the editor of ArtReview, the biggest international contemporary art magazine, with established readership among those publications.

Competition: Ways of Seeing;Playing to the Gallery;Understood;Ways of Looking;The Hare with Amber Eyes;Outline. John Berger;Grayson Parry;Ossian Ward;Edmund de Waal;Rachel Cusk;Ben Lerner