About the book
From the Taurus publishing house we want to inform you of the publication of Will Gompertz’s new book, Look What You’re Missing. After the great success of his previous book, What Are You Looking At? One hundred and fifty years of modern art, the prestigious popularizer and critic Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists, from contemporary stars to old masters, from the most famous to some less known, throughout the world, to show us how to look and experience the world with greater awareness.
Artists have learned to pay attention. The rest of us, however, spend most of our time on autopilot, rushing from here to there, and our overfamiliarity with our surroundings blinds us to the endless marvelous life-affirming phenomena. But it does not have to be like that.
After reading Look What You’re Missing, we enjoyed contemplating the sky on cloudy days like the romantic painter John Constable; Hockney becomes the new guide for our walks through the forest; we understand what a poppy really is thanks to Georgia O’Keeffe; and Rembrandt infects us with his courage when it comes to looking at ourselves. This book offers us the exhilarating sensation of being truly alive.
«It is not disdain, but a form of blindness that familiarity brings with it. […] With the help of some great painters and sculptors, we too could be more sensitive and more aware. Eliminate those invisible blinders loaded with prejudices that reduce our perspective to tunnel vision. In short, we could turn to artists to help us see what we are missing.
After the great success of his previous book, What Are You Looking At? One hundred and fifty years of modern art, in which the prestigious popularizer and critic Will Gompertz set out to bring the masterpieces of modern and contemporary art closer to the viewer, masterfully and humorously avoiding the intermediaries that hinder the experience of contemplating and enjoying them genuinely and directly ( intellectual pretensions, mystifications, etc…), the English author doubles the bet with Look What You’re Missing and sets out, this time, to break the veil that separates us from the aesthetic experience of the world in our daily events, a veil formed by conventions, customs and clichés. All of us, Gompertz maintains, can look at reality as an artist does and access, through this, a fuller experience of our own life. You just need to stop to examine in some detail how each specific artist perceives the world, stop to contemplate one of their works starting from the certainty that what differentiates their way of seeing from that of those who do not pay attention is precisely that: that they do pay attention and have managed, thanks to this, to keep the child’s gaze alive, that of those who discover the world every day, in every moment, because they capture its call in the small details of light, color and meaning. . We can all do it, says Gompertz, and, in addition to being enriching, it is extremely fun
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/mira-lo-que-te-pierdes
