
Ward discusses at length the role of the artist, acknowledges the contradictions of the art world and seemingly genuinely tells the reader how things are, reflecting on how things could have been. The aim of the book is to educate the layperson on not being afraid of approaching contemporary art. Until half-way through the book, it felt like it was indeed helping, especially by using his TABULA rasa framework/method: spend Time with the artwork; Associations; Background; Understand; Look again; Assessment. The book covers "categories" of what you can consider art to be looked at as: entertainment, confrontation, event, message, joke, spectacle, meditation. By the second half of the book you are now only listening to Ward's descriptions of artworks and how do they compare with the initial artwork he opened the chapter with, but of which he didn't finalise his point when cross-referencing with his TABULA rasa method. As much as the chapters help to understand the mood and attitudes/how do artists see their own work, it fails to keep his criteria relevant throughout the book, which I would have liked to see, but admit to being extremely difficult to convey without boring the reader and therefore some other alternative to the writing and even information design of the book would need to be restructured.
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"Contemporary art is often accused of (...) withholding information - of not providing satisfactory explanations or enough supporting evidence to help us grasp the full picture of its creation or meaning - but then this can allow for a more rewarding encounter or experience, one that is far less passive than reading the news or watching didactic documentaries on television. It is often up to the beholder of art to connect the dots or wallow in the same moral or mental quagmire as the artists, who very often don't pretend to have all the answers themselves." Ossian Ward (pg 58)