Book: What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye

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Will Gomperetz is best known as the rather eccentric looking BBC News arts correspondent. However, his cultural pedigree is impeccable. He was Director of the Tate Gallery for 7 years and a seasoned journalist with the Times and Guardian.

Moving through the past 150 years since the recognized birth of 'modern art' Gompertz looks at the different schools of art which sprang up and analyzes each movement in a clear, matter of fact way, without losing the reader in intellectual pseudo-speak.  Nicely illustrated as well, what you are looking at is a great reference book for anyone interested in art.

This is a book to dip in and out as the fancy takes you rather than one solid read from cover to cover. Entertaining and informative for those who want to learn more about art trends.

Book: Photography Reborn - Jonathan Lipkin

 

 It is truly amazing the rate at which technology moves! Four years ago, the author thought that film photography was here to stay for a long while because digital cameras were expensive, not so good, and anyway, people would need fancy computers and printers to make accessible photos. Now easy Internet business is routinely conducted with digital images. 

But, as Lipkin points out, in PHOTOGRAPHY REBORN, it is not only that digital photography takes the place of film. It does, but it also is a genuine new medium. This book tells how and why digital images can out-manipulate experience and reality, be a new aesthetic medium and be more subversive than film photographs in which Trotsky's image was removed from Stalin's. In fact, the book tells not only how digital photography works, but also is a great guide to what it promises to do in the future.