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Art quiz: child, animal or professional

2019-09-02T08:22:28.884Z


Painting children are repeatedly celebrated as outstanding artists. Do you know at a glance whether a work of art originates from a small or a large person - or someone else? Here's the quiz.



You can not wait? Click here for the quiz.

Once I went with two pictures to a frame shop. One was the pencil drawing of a Hamburg artist, which I bought at an exhibition, the other the kindergarten crafting of my four-year-old nephew: a piece of construction paper in which he had roughed a pink ribbon. The frame builder pulled on her white gloves and picked it up carefully.

A gallery owner in Manhattan has done something very similar recently. She hung two-year-old Lola June's paintings on the walls and sold them for up to $ 1500 a picture.

Painting children are repeatedly celebrated as outstanding artists. There was the "blizzard color" Advait Kolarkar from India, whose career began with two, the Australian Aelita Andre, who had her first solo exhibition in New York at the age of four. Or Kieron Williamson, who got the nickname "Mini-Monet" missed by the media at the age of six.

Anyone who considers art nonsense and artists for charlatans, if they do not photorealistic or at least "beautiful", will feel confirmed in his prejudices: This is not art. That's what my daughter can do. Any idiot can pretend to be an artist.

Thoughts about what art is, wants and should be, fill entire libraries. First of all, of course, it is the opposite of nature. In this sense, the work of my nephew is art as well as any scribble, any washed - out concrete slab, garbage, sausage, cars, hats, plastic bags - art. Somehow.

"Thoughts in material"

Balzac called art "condensed nature". Jerry Saltz, the notorious art critic of "New York Magazine," says, "Artists need to be able to embed their thoughts in material." This probably left both my nephew Oskar and just had fun doing. How tight and sharp the needle felt between his fingers, how the thread whirred and hissed as he pulled it through the construction paper. How funny the pink ribbon stood out against the lavender green of the leaf.

Benjamin Maack

Oskar thread work: a dear self-talk partner

In our home, there is hardly a wall where no picture hangs. What do I choose? What comes to me and what not? Of course, first of all, if I can afford it. But right behind it is whether it appeals to me. And in the literal sense. I live with the works in our home, and I talk to them. Or better: I throw my thoughts against them and listen to what comes back. I can imagine that quite a few artists and art experts think this is probably a reasonably limited, perhaps even negligent, approach to art. But for me personally, a good work of art is one that gives me suggestions for many interesting self-talk.

I also often stand in front of Oscar's thread-picture and am happy. How the thread goes up and down, how the sun has bleached the paper over the years, how the shape of an empty, patchy speech bubble resembles. In all these observations my thoughts can get tangled up. In that sense, it was actually no joke when I had Oskar's sheet framed as a work of art. It has become a dear self-talk partner.

Zerrfeld out of respect and admiration

And what does that mean for art now? Anyone can do it, and if anyone can do with it, if anyone is willing to spend money on it in a gallery, if someone has previously called himself artist or was called by anyone, is it art?

It's a bit like that.

For example, do you know when and by whom "Mona Lisa" was named the greatest work of art in the world? No? Neither do I. Probably hardly one of the tens of millions who year after year make a pilgrimage to the Louvre to crowd in front of the DinA4-sheet-sized portrait. I already did that too. And like a Bob Dylan concert, even in the presence of da Vinci's coolly smiling lady, this strained atmosphere of respect and admiration, which has little to do with what's going on, is born.

Unfortunately, the picture says nothing to me, the face of the "Gioconda" seems to me like a porcelain, dead surface. But what do I know?

So what makes an object into a work of art? At the end everyone can decide for themselves. For me art is indispensable and at the same time as useful as a bottle opener: with one I make my beer, with the other my head.

Do you know what art is? Can you differentiate the works of a "true artist" from children's images? Or those of the painting pig Pigcasso?

Find out! Here's the quiz.

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2019-09-02

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