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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

How Art Made the World

20:59 / 09.05.05

Nigel Spivey's programmes trace the influence of ancient artistic endeavour on modern culture. There's this handy wee test online that aims to examine how your personality type and your artistic taste do or don't marry up. Apparently perople like me like North European Art. Only I don't. I went for the Islamic secular Art. I'm contrary.

I enjoyed the programme tonight but it fair romped along and I missed threads of his argument. Loved the bite-sized chunks approach to the psychology of art history though. That Willendorf Venus is a cutie!

22:25 / 09.05.05

Ooo good test. I was also contrary; seemingly people of my gender, age and personality type preferred impressionism but I preferred Japanese ukiyo-e. And although I definitely prefer ukiyo-e to impressionism I don't think that this conclusion is exactly representative of my taste, particularly when I think about it and hold my admittedly small knowledge of ukiyo-e up against my favourite pieces of Expressionist art, Romanticism, Pop Art, Graffiti, Comic Book Art or Art Nouveau. While saying that I did really admire the selected pieces of ukiyo-e so perhaps I should remedy my unfamiliarity with it.

I understand the need to shy away from more famous pieces for the test, but what did you think of the painting choice?

I found myself very aware of what I thought talent entailed whilst taking the test i.e. I equate talent mostly with skill and skill mostly with realistic renditions or photo-realistically (?) depicted surrealism. I also fully realise this to be a very regressive way to think about it.

23:32 / 09.05.05

Odd, I got the exact same results as PolytheneHarvey, but different threories behind it. To me, ultra-realism looks like a nice practice piece (though I do have a soft spot for well done cloth). I think my opinion of 'talent' was a little skewed when I found out this winter just how annoyingly hard ukiyo-e can be to create.

I was moslty pleased with the pieces presented, though I thought there should have been a wider selection. It all seemed to be either made in Europe in the last two hundred years or from Japan. I would have liked to see a few other cultures represented.

17:56 / 12.05.05

I got Ukiyo-e as my favourite as well. There is a suggestion in the description of Ukiyo-e that if one likes Japanese art, one might also like Art Nouveau, Impressionism and Manga comics, which is entirely true for me.

20:41 / 01.06.05

I'm supposed to like Impressionism but apparently prefer Northern Renaissance. Not sure what, if anything, that means.

Tryphena Absent

00:25 / 02.06.05

Apparently most people of my age, personality type and gender prefer impressionism but I liked abstract art. That suggests to me that most of those people were quite conservative.

10:09 / 02.06.05

People like me were supposed to like Ukiyo-e best, and I preferred the Cubism. Ukiyo-e might have been in with a chance as I liked almost all of the pictures they had in that style, but really disliked the one of the woman so I think that dragged the average down. Also, all the cubist pictures they had were fantastic.

Did anyone else find it difficult to answer the 'how talented do you think the artist is' question? Every time I rated one as below 'good' I wanted to tell the quiz, "but maybe I just don't know enough about it to answer that!"

Tryphena Absent

14:19 / 02.06.05

I had to keep my talent scores down because I began so low and I don't really believe you can rate those type of artists against one another.

18:49 / 02.06.05

Know whatcha mean. I think I rated everybody quite high on the talent scale, even when I scored them low on whether or not I liked the work, personally. My rule of thumb was "is that better than I could do", although looking at the original and not a reduced online image might have allowed me a better impression of the craft involved.

I think it's inmteresting that so many of the Barbeloids taking the test are confounded the expe3ctations of the testers. Perhaps that's a feature of few people having taken the test overall, and it's still developing a base to rate against, or perhaps it's that you are all just contrary fuckers. I prefer the latter explanation.

Tryphena Absent

23:18 / 02.06.05

I wonder if it isn't that we're simply aware of the variety of art and don't automatically pick the work we recognise. I assume that most of the people who read this forum are interested in art in some form, which suggests a level of education on the subject, even if it's self-education. A survey of the country and the art that the majority loves is going to be different to a survey of people who visit a gallery once a month.