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March 09, 2007

Art or fake?

M.V. Simkin, Scientific inquiry in modern art, E-print, (2007).

I report the results of the test, where the takers had to tell true masterpieces of abstract art from the fakes, produced by myself. Every picture can be described by the fraction of the test takers, who selected it as a masterpiece. When judged by this metric, the pictures show no stratification between masterpieces and fakes, suggesting that they are of about the same quality.

Simkin's website reverent.org hosts the quiz itself, which you can take. I scored a dismal 75% accuracy (better than chance, and slightly better than the average score of Ivy Leaguers and Oxbridge participants (71%), but shameful considering how much time I've spent in art museums over the years). His site has several other quizzes, too, and my self-esteem is mildly assuaged by the fact that, at least, I can distinguish human art from non-human crap (bird poop vs. Jackson Pollock: 100%, human vs. ape: 100%). I didn't dare to try to distinguish machine translation from Faukner.

posted March 9, 2007 10:54 AM in Humor | permalink

Comments

Posted by: James Horey at March 9, 2007 11:53 AM