conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled Art For Dummies about Metropolitan, Museum, Art with the genre: Arts & Photography, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: What a privilege it is to stroll through thousands of years of magnificent art with the keen-eyed, confident, supremely knowledgeable the author, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose opinionated, charming prose could make anyone feel like an art-world insider. Whether or not you know an ism from an altarpiece, the author will gently grasp your elbow and welcome you to the party, introducing you to everyone who's anyone and encouraging you to partake of the nourishing, sumptuous feast. Like most of the books in the For Dummies series, this one isn't, really. It's a delightful, erudite romp, cleverly and clearly designed to allow the art-curious reader to correct for a nearly universal deficit in American education. There are pictures, of course, including some in color, but this book assumes real love on the part of the reader, who is expected to get off the couch and--with the author's excellent guidance--go find the real thing and gaze upon it in the flesh.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Art For Dummies
  What came after Impressionism is called post-Impressionism, a term coined by the English art critic Roger Fry. It was actually not a movement at all, and the term, all too vaguely, signifies works by painters who retained the shimmering effects of light and the outdoors palette but who preferred more formal compositions. Eventually, their achievements would give birth to modern abstraction.
  I think the word post-Impressionism should be set aside once and for all since it's almost impossible to shoehorn certain artists into the vague category.
  To me, it's more accurate to call the period pre-Modern. The last quarter of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th was a time when artistic experimentation was rampant, and a bewildering number of styles were invented. In that sense, the period is a mirror of contemporary times.
  The range of painting was cosmic — from the faded Neoclassic stuff the members of the official academy, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, were still churning out, to **Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,** who was and was not an Impressionist and who stands alone with a personalized and quirky form of realism, to **Auguste Renoir** who, in the 1860s, momentarily renounced his impressionistic pyrotechnics and devoted himself to a linearism with extreme emphasis on contours and silhouettes that owes much to Ingres, to **Paul Gauguin's** eccentric brand of oddly colored provincial French scenes, to the tightly drawn, near-mathematical "Pointillist" color theories and applications of **Georges Seurat** and **Paul Signac,** to the shattering expressionistic bombshells of **Vincent van Gogh,** and, finally, to the utterly non-naturalistic paeans to Mother Nature envisioned as best recreated with the "cylinder, sphere, and cone" by the most unlikely painter to achieve what a growing number of art historians are placing in the category of best-in-history, **Paul Cézanne,** who, in 1878, dedicated himself to making "Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums."
  Pointillism started life at the 1884 Salon des Indépendants (meaning, of course, those completely independent of the official Salon, which was still alive, though huffing and puffing). Georges Seurat took the Impressionist practice of applying broken colors to suggest shimmering light and movement to a non-naturalistic extreme. Painstakingly, almost obsessively, Seurat painted tiny dots and thin slashes of contrasting color side by side — thousands upon thousands of them, not only upon the surface of the canvas, but even on their frames — theorizing that by this stark (and highly abstract) system, the hues would meld and merge and create an optical mixture in the eye of the beholder. His somewhat rigid compositions were dictated to a certain extent by theorists who held that the direction and movement of lines — up for happiness and contentment, down for sadness and anxiety — were sure to influence the onlooker.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is two more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Nothing is more hazardous than predicting who among today's artists are bound to become the old masters of the future. It's easy for the professional to determine where, for example, a newly unearthed Greek statue fits into the rest of classical art or where a recently discovered Gothic Virgin and Child ranks in comparison to all the others surviving. But to say where a living artist fits in? All but impossible. The pros always say the only way to tell if a living artist is going to make it big is to wait 150 years and see.
  Here's my short list of those living artists who are the prime. Maybe you should buy one of them now so your grandchildren can dangle their wills before the covetous eyes of the biggest museums in the land, and be wined and dined for the rest of their lives at the homes of wealthy museum trustees.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'A proper cultural tour of Istanbul cannot be done in less than a week'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A proper cultural tour of Istanbul cannot be done in less than a week. Other than the unmatched riches of architecture and art, there are spectacular walking tours, the grand and spooky bazaar, marvelous places to dine, and day trips to places like the fishing village of Tarabia, which is charming.
  Istanbul is a quintessential Islamic city, and what Christian monuments there are survive decently enough, yet they are nestled within the protective embrace of Islam. The gorgeous mosques and the Topkap Saray or Topkapi Palace are the prime attractions.
  The Palace possesses an enormous collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelains, which in size, variety, and quality, beats all other collections, even the legendary holdings of the Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan. The Chinese pieces number 10,700, ranging from the late Song of the 13th century through the Ch'ing Qing period (1644-1912). There are up to 730 Japanese porcelains dating from 17th to the 19th centuries. One of my favorites is a plain white ewer of the Ming dynasty dating to the early 15th century whose pearl-shaped body is decorated in gold with rubies. Another is a fabulous blue and white Chinese plate with the Ch'i-lin motif dating to the Yuan dynasty of the 14th century.12
  I'd strongly recommend visits to three other places in Turkey — Ankara for the great museum of Hittite objects, Ephesus for the wonderful Greek city and especially the Greek library with its lofty columned facade, and the archaeological site of the Hellenistic city of Aphrodisias.
  The latter is situated in the high logging country above the city of Izmir and has been excavated brilliantly for several decades by specialists from New York University. There are copious remains of imposing, monumental marble sculptures of the Hellenistic period and a unique amphitheater, virtually intact, which one comes across quite suddenly when walking over the site, since it was completely hollowed out of the ground.