This book can’t decide if it’s a textbook, a how-to instruction book, or a contemporary art book. It succeeds at being none of these.
There’s a lot of information here, but very little of it is actually useful. Why is it that artsies can’t seem to write an instruction properly? The more academic they are and the closer they are to “fine art”, the worse it gets.
When art struggles to pay its own bills, the bullshit meter tends to go off scale.
And there’s quite a bit of of pure bullshit in here. Even the text often reads like an artist’s statement. Look for the Scrabble words, like “juxtaposes”. If you need some slop for your statement you could simply lift it from here like slices of cake from a box (but be sure to credit the source).
The book wins on volume of information, but any book this size is always disappointing when the instructional photos are so bad. (Bad photos being especially sinful for an art book,)
It contains lots of examples of people’s art, some of it very interesting and often beautiful, although art is definitely in the eye of the beholder. (Such is the case with all art books.)
In all this book fails, because like so many weak instruction manuals, it relies too much on assumed knowledge. It’s also too highly written to be truly straightforward and instructional. If you want to learn how to actually do these techniques, you’d be better off apprenticing with a master (if such a thing were still possible nowadays) or at least watching a lot of YouTube.