If you consider yourself a Heavyweight Intellectual, just curl your lip in disgust and move on; this book isn't for you. On the other hand, if you are the type of person who hears the name Raphael and thinks "Turtle", then The Creators just might expand your horizons a little. There's something for the vast middle ground, too. While I consider myself conversant about the biggies like Shakespeare or Mozart, there were plenty of creators like Dante, Rabelais, Gibbon or Verdi where I learned something. In a way, this book is something like An Incomplete Education, for it helps fill in the gaps where you dozed off in the Survey class, or where you didn't get to study at all. Boorstin, who was Librarian of Congress, a history professor, and a director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, makes it an interesting study.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
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.
2 - Bruce Kratofil
"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.