Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction, by David Cottington

Rather mucked up here by reading this book concurrently with Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction so I've not ended up with a terrifically clear idea of which is which, especially since this book talks about postmodernism too.

There is some interesting stuff in here about how the modern art movement started, and what it was about - "partly as a reaction against that very collapse of art's values into spectacle and commerce that characterised 19th-century academicism" [p11]. But having read it, I don't think I've changed my views about a lot of what passes for "modern art" - maybe has some transitive novelty value, but a lot of it is just tosh. Anyway, here are some things I marked in the text:

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