Modern Art vs. Toddler Art: can you tell the difference?

I like your intent but wrong artist. Van Gogh is all abut brushwork.

 

Well, I completely guessed on #1, because I thought they might start with a Fake toddler painting.

Plus, it probably only took you 2 minutes. I spent 10 minutes on it.

 

Same for me on #1. I spent more time posting about it than answering the quiz, you are right. You wasted at least 8-9 minutes on this dumb thing.

 

I love me some modern art. With that said those all look like ****. Didn't even bother to guess.

 

The mix of colors is normally the easiest way to tell the difference, but #3 is honestly the best of the entire bunch -- it's really an amazing painting from

Spoiler

a young child.

Number 10 is the absolute worst of the bunch and a complete joke of work.

 

11/11

Very easy to identify inspired art vs. the happy scribblings of a toddler

 

Whatever toddler did #3 needs to go to Art school and focus on art...wtf...

 

9/11 missed #3 and #6

 

6/11

I've made some masterpieces in my day lol.

 

9/11 Missed number 3 and 7.. Spent some time thinking on 3 though..

 

5 out of 11. Honestly, I thought I'd do worse. Also, I think #1 and #4 look great!

Heh, so true.

 

I got 7 of 11

 

Color blending, strokes, use of space. But even still i only got 8/11 right.

 

7/11

i looked for patterns and color associations, contrast and brush strokes

 

I got 5/11 but I couldnt see the pictures since I guess my work blocks the host site of them so I was just guessing blindly.

 

8/11

I recently went to Tate Modern, a modern art gallery in London. Some of the stuff was cool, but half of it was just dumb. One piece had, if I remember correctly, some nails tied to string hanging from a piece of wood... looked like someone you would find on an archaeology dig. Another, which I originally thought was some paint peeling off the wall, was a piece of paper cut into a hexagon.

 

Votes are everywhere. Unless you're a style and "art" connoisseur, you will think they aren't any different from each other. Kudos to you dudes who can get all of them... but I doubt that this happens in real life.

Anyway, "modern art" could also be a toddler's work.

 

I studied art, and specifically modern art for a time, in college, and I got 7/11.

I will say a couple of these were deliberately deceptive, that and/or I over thought a couple.

I have known some artists that would be thrilled that someone would mistake their work for a toddler's. I'm not sure what this 'test' tells anyone, except that it doesn't really reveal what most would think initially (e.g. "They're the SAME.... a CHILD could paint that) ... nor do I think getting a good or bad score means anything notable.

That a movement might contain art that looks like children could paint it tells more about the movement than it does about an artist or a piece of work.

 

^ I also meant to say: "if you've seen all the REAL 'works of modern art' before"... in my post before yours... but I agree with all that you've said.

 

1. #3 was created more by a technique than by a toddler. It's Dadaist in that regard, using randomness to generate the picture. The child's parent helped her swirl colored shaving cream in a pan and then laid a piece of paper on top to get the marbling effect.

2. I think the essence of art appreciation is to apply meaning to the artwork. The artist is providing a stimulus, but the work is done by the viewer.

One implication of that is that viewers trying to apply meaning base their intepretation on an assumption that the meaning is inherent in the work and intentional on the part of the artist. I think that's what makes comparing modern art to toddler art or elephant art is always used as a criticism -- because they are indistinguishable from one another but one is intentional and the others accidental. There's a way in which the criticism is valid; maybe the stimulus the artist provides is inadequate (with some of these examples, I think it's true -- these modern artists gave us something with bad composition, a stupid title, and not much interest to grab onto, and I don't know why they hung it in a muesum). On the other hand, if the point of the exercise is to imbue with meaning, maybe how intentional the stimulus is doesn't matter so long as the assumption is held enough to let the viewer apply an interpretation. Maybe slapping a frame on something and hanging it in the MOMA is enough to make toddler art into modern art.

Another implication is that the viewer has to do work, and most people aren't willing to do so. At his art shows, my father is usually asked umpteen times what a painting means, and he'll usually deflect the question back to them. He has an idea in his head about what it means, but he doesn't intend to oppress others with his interpretation. That usually means, though, that they'll come away with not much interpretation at all, maybe just a visceral feeling, because they didn't have the literacy or the initiative to engage with the work. I know I do that myself, seeing thousands of paintings and not wanting to think deeply about most of them. And when someone is asked more pointedly to comment on or judge a painting (like in this quiz, a terrible place for art appreciation), the fall back is to critique the craftsmanship or maybe even the composition, instead of how it makes you feel, or what it makes you think, or what you think it all means. And modern art usually fails here with many people because craftsmanship isn't the highest priority for most modern art.