andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-102 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This looks cool: Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been carefully created for them, started to refer to it as “a painting”. Now that experiment . . . has gone on to form part of the foundation of an influential new book that questions the way in which we respond to art. . . . The book, which is subtitled The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, is not an attack on modern or contemporary art and Bloom says fans of more traditional art are not capable of making purely aesthetic judgments either. “I don’t have a strong position about the art itself,” he said this weekend. “But I do have a strong position about why we actually like it.” This sounds fascinating. But I’m skeptical about this part: Humans are incapable of just getti
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1 This looks cool: Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. [sent-1, score-0.255]
2 Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. [sent-2, score-0.3]
3 has gone on to form part of the foundation of an influential new book that questions the way in which we respond to art. [sent-7, score-0.154]
4 The book, which is subtitled The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, is not an attack on modern or contemporary art and Bloom says fans of more traditional art are not capable of making purely aesthetic judgments either. [sent-11, score-2.308]
5 “I don’t have a strong position about the art itself,” he said this weekend. [sent-12, score-0.62]
6 But I’m skeptical about this part: Humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks, he [Paul Bloom, the author of the book described above] argues. [sent-15, score-0.598]
7 What is it about art that makes people say such silly things ? [sent-16, score-0.483]
8 This above sentence is not a direct quote from Bloom, though, so maybe it’s just a misunderstanding coming from Vanessa Thorpe, the author of the above-quoted news article. [sent-17, score-0.18]
9 As noted above, at one point, Thorpe writes: The book . [sent-19, score-0.154]
10 is not an attack on modern or contemporary art and Bloom says fans of more traditional art are not capable of making purely aesthetic judgments either. [sent-22, score-2.235]
11 But look later on: “Traditional art is about what is in the world; more modern works are about the very process of representation,” he writes. [sent-23, score-0.694]
12 “An appreciation of much of modern art therefore requires specific expertise. [sent-24, score-0.762]
13 Any dope can marvel at a Rembrandt, but only an elite few can make any sense of a work such as Sherrie Levine’s Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), and so only an elite few are going to enjoy it . [sent-25, score-0.296]
14 ” I wonder if the author of this book (and the author of the news article) have read Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, which tells a story that’s pretty coherent to me. [sent-31, score-0.576]
15 I worry about the circularity of defining modern art as abstract stuff that’s hard to follow. [sent-32, score-0.694]
16 To me this seems to have a lot more to do with the history of the academic/museum art world in the 20th century than with psychological perceptions of art. [sent-33, score-0.546]
17 I’d really hate to generalize from statements about Jackson Pollock (whose “drip” paintings I, personally, see no merit in whatsoever, but, hey, that’s just me talking here) to claims that “humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks. [sent-34, score-0.411]
18 ” I’m hoping to go to Lascaux in August (yeah, I know, they don’t let you into the real Lascaux, but the tour guides say that the fake one nearby is pretty good) so can report back to you then. [sent-35, score-0.201]
19 In the meantime, the psychology research looks great, and I suppose the author of an academic book can hardly complain if an overwhelmingly positive newspaper article gets a few things wrong. [sent-36, score-0.558]
20 I’m looking forward to reading the book myself, that’s for sure. [sent-37, score-0.154]
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Introduction: Jed Dougherty points me to this opinion piece by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of art at Northwestern University, who writes: Artists are defensive these days because in May the House passed an amendment to a bill eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. Colleagues, especially those who have received N.E.A. grants, will loathe me for saying this, but just this once I’m sympathetic with the anti-intellectual Republicans behind this amendment. Why? The bill incited a national conversation about a subject that has troubled me for decades: the government — disproportionately — supports art that I do not like. Actually, just about nobody likes modern art. All those soup cans—what’s that all about? The stuff they have in museums nowadays, my 4-year-old could do better than that. Two-thirds of so-called modern artists are drunk and two-thirds are frauds. And, no, I didn’t get my math wrong—there’s just a lot of overlap among these categories! It’s an open secret in my
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