Comment by Bruce Kratofil

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 09:31:03 EDT

"Do you mean to say that if you found the book intriguing, then you're probably an idiot?" No -- the point I was trying to make was that a small sub-sector of the population (think of the loud mouth professor standing in the movie line in "Annie Hall") won't like it -- but that most people would be able to learn something. Actually, I was most intrigued by something else in the first part -- the fact that most other religions don't have creation stories.

Comment by Rodney Welch

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 19:00:55 EDT

Do you mean to say that if you found the book intriguing, then you're probably an idiot? That's me then. I suppose it was superficial in some places, but that's probably going to be true of any survey of Western art -- and I can't think of many that take on so much territory and boil it down so well (although I'm sure there are some). The problem I had was that he never really explained why Da Vinci was the world's greatest painter -- eventhough he told some great stories about him -- and I disagreed with some of his choices in the artists he chose to profile. But man, I thought all the stuff at the beginning was really enlightening, didn't you? It was news to me, for example, that the Second Commandment -- "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above" -- at one time really meant exactly that: God makes art, not you, and and if you try to do it you're trying to be God, and that's blasphemy. So all that history of how people got past that and developed the arts in general was just fascinating to me.

Blogcritics: Comments on The Creators - Daniel Boorstin

Comment by Bruce Kratofil

Comment by Rodney Welch