I'm obsessed with hoaxes lately, and our ability to admit what we don't know. This is a wonderful art quiz. Can you tell the masterpiece from the hoax? I scored a 67%. This is a similar quiz. Again I scored a 67%.
Visual arts not your thing? Try this prose quiz, and distinguish snippets of Faulkner from a bad machine translation of German. I was more disappointed this time, because I scored only a 75% score, and I thought I could do better than that with an author I like very much.
9 comments:
I got 67% on the art, also. Maybe the fix is in. Or the artists really are only marginally distinguishable from animals and other amateurs.
Eric Hines
67% here as well. I took the general methodology of marking "fake" anything that looked computer-generated. That didn't improve or degrade the score.
Context is everything- who was the person who deemed it "art" in the first place? A lot of modern art is the case of the King with No Clothes.
I got 8% on the Faulkner. I guess there was a reason why I didn't major in English....
"who was the person who deemed it "art" in the first place?" -- Yes, that's the quizzer's point, I think. What makes us call it "art" if we can't tell it from scribbles without the authoritative teaching of critics? The quizzes are a way of saying that the Emperor has no clothes. I'm pretty sure none of us would have had any difficulty distinguishing the work of animals from humans in pre-1900 art.
I'm pretty sure none of us would have had any difficulty distinguishing the work of animals from humans in pre-1900 art.
??
Are you suggesting that animals weren't generating art before the 20th century?
[g]
Eric Hines
I did 100% correct on the Art, but then I actually go to a major art museum regularly, and go to the modern galleries simply to make fun of the stuff.
I get what the early abstract artists were trying to do, but nearly all of them started out being trained in representational art, and then tried something else.
These days, 'modern' art is an inchoate mess of stale ideas. The bourgeoisie cannot be shocked anymore.
75% on the first test, but only 58% on the 'abstract vs. bremen artists' test. I wonder about the test, though- I got the Mondrian wrong- and I know Mondrian, but thought it too imbalanced- I suspect it's not considered one of Mondrian's best. Remember, great artists make bad works too, we just don't normally look at them, but if you select those, they might not rate so well. On the other hand, I do believe a lot of 'art' is really cultural and not true aesthetics.
Eric, you're right on- I don't much like Picasso's works, but when I was in Luzern travelling as a student I visited a museum there that had a great many Picasso's. There were many sketches and early works, and you could see that he had the classical chops, so he could have done traditional art, and chose not to. Today's modern artist all to often have none of those skills, and the reliance on shock and 'one-liners'.
I got the Mondrian wrong, partly because no Mondrian does anything for me, and partly because it seemed an obvious example of one that would be easy to fake, so I was overthinking the test.
Did anyone take the Faulkner test besides Gringo and me?
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