The series addressed the development of modern art since the Impressionists and was accompanied by a book of the same name.
[citation needed] The Shock of the New took three years to create, and Hughes travelled about 250,000 miles (400,000 km) during the filming to include particular places or people.
Hughes remembers being directed by Pegram with her saying, "It's a clever argument, Bob dear, but what are we supposed to be looking at?".
][citation needed] The book of the series was published in 1980 by the BBC under the title The Shock of the New: Art and the century of change.
[12] Topics covered the Eiffel Tower, World Trade Center, 9/11, Turner, Goya, David, Picasso's Guernica as the last truly political painting, Whitney Biennial, Warhol, fashion as the primary model of art, Koons, Duchamp, Michelangelo, Masaccio, exploding prices of the art market, Rego, Kiefer, information overload, Hockney, the skill of drawing, art as the opposite of mass media, Freud, Gilbert and George, post-modernism, slowness of painting, Mondrian, Rothko, Kelly, Scully, beauty, and Eliasson.