Thursday, June 12, 2003
Finished 'The Story of Art' by E.H. Gombrich this morning. Very good and I recommend it to anyone who, like me, needs not to brush up on their art history but to actually get some knowledge of it to start with. The last chapter is a bit of a mess though, partly written at the time of the book, then as part of a new edition some years later, then again some years after that. If an even newer edition is published in the future perhaps that last chapter can be edited into a more cohesive single essay as at the moment it's a rather disjointed essay about sixties art, how difficult it is to spot future trends and trying to sum up the book.
Something that took me a lot less time to read (a couple of hours) was 'A Book of Pages' by David Whiteland. It's a simple, and at times almost simplistic, story of a young monk, called Jiriki, who is sent by his abbot on a quest to the technology-obsessed city refered to only as the Metropolis to retrieve a book that he has no idea about anything to do with it's content or location. Each page is half-text, half an illustration. If from my description of the story you suspect that it's all about how technology is a bad thing that has made our lives more disconnected and frantic than solved our problems and that the moral of the story is that we should all live pure and simplistic lives such as those who live in a monastery and are called monks, then you'd be about right. But while the overall story is predictable and shallow some of the individual pages and the monologues therein are nice, and the illustrations executed with some technical skill.
Something that took me a lot less time to read (a couple of hours) was 'A Book of Pages' by David Whiteland. It's a simple, and at times almost simplistic, story of a young monk, called Jiriki, who is sent by his abbot on a quest to the technology-obsessed city refered to only as the Metropolis to retrieve a book that he has no idea about anything to do with it's content or location. Each page is half-text, half an illustration. If from my description of the story you suspect that it's all about how technology is a bad thing that has made our lives more disconnected and frantic than solved our problems and that the moral of the story is that we should all live pure and simplistic lives such as those who live in a monastery and are called monks, then you'd be about right. But while the overall story is predictable and shallow some of the individual pages and the monologues therein are nice, and the illustrations executed with some technical skill.
