Quiz about real versus fake

[jean]

He just said the works 'meant nothing', didn't he?

[MrGongGong]

He just said the works 'meant nothing', didn't he?

Yes
Given that they obviously don't "mean nothing" is a joke

[Flosshilde]

If he'd just presented his own works on their own they might have meant nothing, but as he presented them in juxtaposition with and in opposition to works by 'geniuses', as a means of testing the viewer, then they clearly do have a meaning.

And it doesn't matter if the creator says a work doesn't have a 'meaning'; once it is in the public domain then the viewer can invest it with a meaning.

[jean]

And it doesn't matter if the creator says a work doesn't have a 'meaning'...

Indeed - but here we aren't discussing the truth of the matter, but only what the creator said and how far his tongue was in his cheek when he said it.

[Sir Velo]

I'm not sure about the view that Meegeren gives the game away with his faces alone (though Vermeer would never have used such an ugly Christ). Take a look at these paintings and ask whether if we didn't already know the sitters' identities we would be able to tell to which century they belonged.






The first has all the playfulness of a twenties' country house game of charades; while the Donne with his dreamy pout and sallow complexion is a jaggeresque album cover avant l'heure.

[jean]

...(though Vermeer would never have used such an ugly Christ)...

Don't you think his Christ in Christ in the house of Martha and Mary is pretty ugly?

[jean]

Actually, we did not need to speculate about the purpose of the quiz...it's all out there (it was ENC after all).

http://reverent.org/forum/index.php?topic=4709.0

http://www.technologyreview.com/view...-abstract-art/ (The comments here are interesting)


.

[french frank]

Don't you think his Christ in Christ in the house of Martha and Mary is pretty ugly?

It's been said (by Blankert among others) that the young Vermeer copied the pose from the painting (definitely not a Vermeer!) of the same subject by Erasmus Quellinus, beside which Vermeer's Christ could well be thought 'uglier':

[french frank]

Another article.

(NB They keep talking of kg instead of g)

[aeolium]

John Carey's definition of what constituted a work of art (in his book What Good Are The Arts?) was this: "'A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person.' Further, the reasons for considering anything a work of art will be as various as the variety of human beings. So far as I can see this is the only definition wide enough to take in, on the one hand the Primavera and the Mass in C, and on the other, a can of human excrement [Piero Manzoni's] and a child's blue-painted tie."* This definition clearly takes no account of the intentions of the creator of a work of art - which in many cases may never be known.

* The blue-painted tie refers to a hypothesis of the art critic Arthur Danto who imagined that Picasso had painted a necktie blue and at the same time a child unknown to Picasso and knowing nothing about him had also painted a necktie blue and by chance the ties were identical in every respect. Danto judged that Picasso's tie was a work of art and the child's tie was not.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Actually, we did not need to speculate about the purpose of the quiz...it's all out there (it was ENC after all).

But with Vermeer involved, the NCs are quite O! Isn't it more that he's suggesting that, for all the claims and (as he might term it) pretentions of certain people, they don't "really" know the difference between a work by a known Artist and another by somebody else?

And isn't the flaw behind such "democratic" "reasoning" that it devalues the whole notion of Education? Couldn't there also be a "Genuine Equation or Random Hits on the Keyboard?" Quiz in which people are invited to spot which row of alphanumeric figures is a genuine Scientific Equation and which made up for the purpose of ... well, allowing the quiz-setter to arrive at the conclusion that a lot of people don't know the difference?

[french frank]

And isn't the flaw behind such "democratic" "reasoning" that it devalues the whole notion of Education? Couldn't there also be a "Genuine Equation or Random Hits on the Keyboard?" Quiz in which people are invited to spot which row of alphanumeric figures is a genuine Scientific Equation and which made up for the purpose of ... well, allowing the quiz-setter to arrive at the conclusion that a lot of people don't know the difference?

Well, they do say that 66% correct is better than random - though it doesn't sound very good to me.

[jean]

It didn't to Simkin.

But if we say anything about education we might be accused of being elitist.

I am off now to Tate Liverpool to see the Mondrian with my sister, who makes art. Looking forward to that because I always get so much more from any art when I see it with her (perhaps I'm just seeing what she puts there? Discuss.)

I did send her the quiz, but I'm a bit embarrassed about that now that I know what its purpose was.

One thing Simkin hasn't understood is what distinguishes children's art from pigeon droppings.

[Flosshilde]

Actually, we did not need to speculate about the purpose of the quiz...it's all out there (it was ENC after all).

http://reverent.org/forum/index.php?topic=4709.0

http://www.technologyreview.com/view...-abstract-art/ (The comments here are interesting)
[/COLOR]

The first piece (http://www.technologyreview.com/view...-abstract-art/) cited in the post on the first link above comes across as a candidate for Krystal's other thread on dodgy statistics -

"First, he points out the results of another well known experiment in which people are asked to evaluate weights by picking them up. As the weights become more similar, it is harder to tell which is heavier. In fact, people will say that a 100g weight is heavier than a 96g weight only 72 per cent of the time.

“This means that there is less perceptible difference between an abstractionist and child/animal than between 100 and 96g,” says Simkin.

So on this basis, if you were to allocate artistic ‘weight’ to artists and gave an abstract artist 100g, you would have to give a child or animal 96g. In other words, there is only a 4 per cent difference between them.
"

[french frank]

I think his primary intention was to find a method (if there was such a thing) by which one could quantify the differences in human responses. Whether the quantification also genuinely represents the difference between the works and artists might be questioned and depends on what you are understanding by the statistics. Doesn't it?