Art for Dummies Review

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Art for Dummies ReviewI give Art for Dummies one star for its one good piece of advice: to immerse yourself in art, to rely on your own eyes rather than on the opinions of others, and to go look at original works, rather than photographs, whenever possible. That's what I've told my Art History students for years. However, IDG Books is aggressively marketing this manual for use as a college textbook or a supplemental reading assignment, and the thought of putting it into the hands of undergraduates, especially intro.-level students, makes my blood run cold. A number of reviewers have commented on the lack of adequate illustrations. I might add that not only are they few, grainy, and postage-stamp size, but a lot of them are printed backward. What really bothers me, though, is the number of careless errors in the text. I'm not talking here about matters of opinion or interpretation, but of documented fact. On Page 5, there is a section with the heading "The Temple of Apollo at Olympia." The temple at Olympia was dedicated to Zeus, not Apollo, although Apollo appears on the sculptural decoration of the pediment. There's a really important difference in Greek religion between the supreme god of Olympus and one of his sons! And on page 48, we learn that " . . . while the Parthenon was being completed, other grandiose artistic achievements were happening. One was the invention of lost-wax bronze casting . . . The sculptor Polykleitos is probably responsible for this method . . . " BULLS**T! Greek historians credit the invention of lost-wax casting to two craftsmen on the island of Samos who lived at least a century earlier than Polykleitos, but Egyptians and Mesopotamians had mastered this technique even earlier. One thing's for sure: competently cast life-sized bronze statues existed in the Greek world long before ground was even broken for the Parthenon, because the Charioteer of Delphi (illustrated by Hoving on page 42! ) can be dated by the evidence of an inscription to 470 or earlier. Polykleitos benefitted from at least a century of workshop tradition in bronze-casting. He was a great and innovative artist, but his influence lay in his system of proportions and treatment of the body in motion, not in casting technology. Now, admittedly, ancient art is not Hoving's field, but shouldn't he at least have asked colleagues in other areas to review his chapters for him when he ventured outside his own area? And shouldn't he have done a little fact-checking for himself? I can just imagine the frustrating conversations in store for any professor who assigns this to college students: "Professor, you made a mistake! It isn't the temple of Zeus at Olympia, it's the temple of Apollo. It says so right here in the book." Students tend to trust what they see in print over what they hear in lectures. I have nothing against the concept of a breezy, informal book about art that avoids a pretentious tone or specialized jargon. But a handbook on art can't be slapped together quickly in the way that a manual for a computer-program can. "WordPerfect 8 for Dummies" will be obsolete as soon as the next upgrade comes out (maybe it already is?), but if the Dummies series is going to venture into other areas, they should give their contributors the time and editorial assistance to do it right.Art for Dummies Overview

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