I enjoyed this a lot, the art is cool to look at, there's a decent amount of information, it's mostly western art but at least there's a wide selection, yeah it's definitely an enjoyable book with cool art so here's some problems but obviously I liked it nevertheless:

Art is often small, sometimes tiny. I think this is the biggest flaw, although one that'd be hard to rectify easily given what the book is trying to do. Sometimes the layout is bad and they could definitely have expanded the reproductions. But a decent amount of stuff is decent sized and there were only a few bits where it really bothered me. Still, a magnifying glass would probably be helpful.

Mostly western art, as I said. Only a few spreads of art outside Europe/then the US. Not surprising and obviously there's space reasons for not going too wide but still it's a big omission. They do at least try and they have some stuff on like Chinese ink painting though so it's better than some.

Poor/orientalist/silly art criticism/bad politics. A lot of this is just normal stuff really and I'm only complaining cause I'm critical of a lot of these mainstream ideas. But one thing that struck me is this "primitivist" (garbage label, especially to describe a trained artist who "imitates" "primitive" art) who had a 14 year old Tahitian "mistress" who he painted in a sexual way and they didn't pass comment on it at all, just acted as if that's totally ok. Grossed me out but that seems the normal way of talking about this disgusting child abuser because hey he did good art!!! Ugh. I'll also note that the modern art descriptions and stuff are often absolutely laughable but tbh I hate a lot of the modern art stuff they have in this book so I guess I would say that.

But overall it's good. ( )