If you've ever taken an introduction to art history course, then you probably have a bookshelf that is buckling under the weight of the doorstopper textbook that you had to buy.

Of course, any art history major knows that these books are really good for pressing wildflowers and flattening rolled up rugs.

But are they actually good for telling the story of the history of art?

Can that even be done?

Can something that big, yet that brief, cover that much material?

And can it do it with any actual depth or nuance when movements are

reduced to paragraphs, whole continents are relegated to a single chapter? It's easy to wonder,

really, what and whose story you're actually being told?

Enter the critic, author, and broadcaster Charlotte Mullins,

and her new book, The Compact, even, I dare say, adorable, a little history of art.

It's smaller and lighter than any textbook, yet it still manages to squeeze in 100,000 years of art history, and many of the artists that my textbook certainly overlooked.

And, beautifully, it brings you into the moment of the artwork's creation.

Charlotte and I talked about the story of art buried deep in the textbooks,

about how art history has been taught and how that teaching has evolved, and how to write about art,

and a lot more. Please enjoy.

Hello, my name is Charlotte Mullins. I'm an art critic and broadcaster and I live in London. Tell me about your book.

Well, it's 100,000 years of art history, crammed into a rather small book for our book.

I mean, it's the size of a paperback. And in those kind of 250 pages, we

we squash in everything from cave art and the very earliest marks right the way through to,

I'm very excited to say, Beyonce and Jay-Z who make it into the final chapter.

Yes, I really appreciated that actually. So that's actually, I mean,

that's a good starting point. I guess our starting point is everything distilled. And that was

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