Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Art in the News

My Kid Could Have Done That!
"A single line thrown onto a canvas. Simple blocks of colour. A clutter of squiggles. Should you be sauntering past the wall of abstracts at a museum this summer, a cynical thought may swiftly follow: “My kid could have done that. Heck, a monkey could've done that.” Well it turns out that your kid and your monkey can't do that.

To test whether people really mistake paintings by professionals with those produced by children and chimps, researchers at Boston College showed art and non-art students pairs of images – one by an Abstract Expressionist (including images by Mark Rothko, Charles Seliger, Clyfford Still, Sam Francis, Hans Hofmann, and Cy Twombly), and one by a child or animal. Their survey results, released in March, revealed that a clear majority of participants in both groups liked the professional paintings more and judged them as better.
“We are showing that the disparaging things people say don’t hold up,” says Ellen Winner, chair of the Department of Psychology at Boston College and co-author of the study Seeing the Mind Behind the Art. “A child could not have painted a Twombly … even the untrained eye can see the difference.”
This was copied from an article on Globe and Mail

drawing by charlotte rossmann

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