Alastair Sooke

Alastair Sooke
Born	1981 (age 42–43)
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford Courtauld Institute of Art (MA)
Occupation	Journalist, broadcaster
Awards	Queen's Scholar

Alastair Sooke (/suːk/) is an art critic and broadcaster, most notably, reporting and commenting on art for British media, and writing and presenting documentaries on art and art history for BBC television and radio. His BBC documentaries include Modern Masters for BBC One, and two three-part series, the Treasures of Ancient Rome and the Treasures of Ancient Greece for BBC Four.. He is also a deputy art critic at the The Daily Telegraph, writing regularly on art and art history, including on the Turner prize and contemporary art. He is a regular reporter on The Culture Show.

Education

Sooke was educated at Westminster School, a boarding independent school in the Westminster area of Central London, where he was a Queen's Scholar, followed by a Westminster Scholarship to Christ Church at the University of Oxford, where he read English language and literature and won the university’s Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize. After graduating with a First, he studied for an M.A. at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, specialising in ancient Greek and Roman art.

Film works

Overview

Sooke is known as a writer and presenter of documentaries on art and art history for BBC television and radio. BBC documentaries include Modern Masters (for BBC One), exploring four artists who shaped modern art; the tripartite series Treasures of Ancient Rome and Treasures of Ancient Greece (for BBC Four); and How the Devil got his Horns, a history of depictions of the Devil in Western art (also for BBC Four).

Filmography

Television

Year	Work	Channel
2010	Modern Masters	BBC One
2011	Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture	BBC Four
2011	The Perfect Suit	BBC Four
2011	The World's Most Expensive Paintings	BBC One
2012	Unfinished	BBC Two
2012	Treasures of Ancient Rome	BBC Four
2012	How the Devil Got His Horns: A Diabolical Tale	BBC Four
2013	Whaam! Roy Lichtenstein at Tate Modern	BBC Four
2013	Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball	BBC Two
2014	Treasures of Ancient Egypt	BBC Four
2014	The World’s Most Expensive Stolen Paintings	BBC Two
2014	Pop go the women: The Other Story of Pop Art	BBC Two
2014	The Summer Exhibition: BBC Arts at the Royal Academy	BBC Two
2014	Constable: A Country Rebel	BBC Four
2015	Treasures of Ancient Greece	BBC Four

Publications

Sooke also serves as an art critic, and writes periodical-length pieces on art theory, history, and criticism, as well as penning investigative pieces that have appeared in journals, and newspapers (including The Telegraph, where is a deputy art critic as of this date, after joining them as a trainee journalist in 2003.). As of this date, Sooke is also regular reporter on The Culture Show. In addition, Sooke has written books, including on Henri Matisse and Roy Lichtenstein.

Sooke's work for The Telegraph has included regular reporting and commentary on contemporary art, writing that has garnered attention beyond audiences in England. Into the new millennium, Sooke has reported and commented periodically on the English prize for contemporary art, the Turner Prize. For instance, responding to the release of the names of those shortlisted for the Turner in 2010, Sooke wrote, "The great triumph of the Turner Prize was that, during the 1990s, it won a large audience for contemporary art in this country. But, now that this battle has been won, it faces a tricky problem: how can it sustain widespread interest when it no longer feels appropriate to describe the work that is shortlisted each year as 'shocking' or 'controversial'?" Speaking on that same occasion, Sooke commented:

[In the past] many British artists made brash, splashy and provocative work that knowingly incited the media, and made for great television. Newspapers and broadcasters loved reporting their provocations, and artists loved dreaming up ever more outrageous antics to provide fodder for newspapers and broadcasters. It was a potent symbiosis. More recently, however, things have quietened down: last year's winner, for instance, was Richard Wright, who makes gentle, exquisite wall paintings that are a world away from the headline-grabbing work of the YBAs [Young British Artists] who, championed by Charles Saatchi, dominated the 1990s. It's as if collectively our attitude to contemporary art has mellowed and matured.

and this perspective was quoted at length in The American Spectator.

In his writing for The Telegraph, Sooke has also reported periodically on the career of Tracey Emin, a "Stuckist" artist, since she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 for her piece, The Bed, where she "notoriously showed her unmade bed, surrounded by squalid mementoes of life on the edge, including empty vodka bottles, pill packets and used condoms." (The Bed did not receive the Turner that year, but sold at auction for £2.2 million (US$3.1M) in 2014, after which it appeared on loan to the Tate Gallery.) In 2008-2014, Sooke categorized Emin's work as being "explicitly confessional," and in the "tradition of outsider art," and describes her as "one of only a handful of British artists who can also claim genuine celebrity," but at least some of her work as being "insufficiently stimulating," visually. Reporting on Emin's widely covered five-week exhibition of gouache nudes, bronze sculptures, and textile and neon pieces in October–November 2014 (at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey, South London), Sooke broke the story that Emin, artist and professor of drawing at the Royal Academy since 2011, had composed the nudes during "life-drawing classes [that] she has been attending in New York," and that the "sculptures are the results of lessons in how to cast bronze over the past three years."

Personal life

Sooke is married and lives in London.

External links

• Listing for Alastair Sooke at United Agents.