I wish they showed more than two paintings in the article. It would be fun to guess.

Me, I prefer the kids drawing on the left in the article, and thought it looked more like art. It’s more deliberate and structured to my eye, while the artist’s one on the right just looks boring. There are lots of little pointless splodges of colour that just make the whole thing look messy.

Link to a PDF of the article here:
http://pages.uoregon.edu/msiuo/taylor/art/scientificamerican.pdf

You can read the original paper here, it’s not very long:
Taylor et al: Perceptual and Physiological Responses to the Visual Complexity of Pollock’s Dripped Fractal Patterns
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.100.2355&rep=rep1&type=pdf

While not an explanation of why Pollock’s art is so valued, Taylor’s ideas can help in understanding perhaps why we can tell the difference between abstart paintings and random paintings.

I think.

The “real” artist seems, consciously or unconsciously, to have been constrained by his training to a constant brush pressure, and so all the lines are confident, assured, and constant-pressure. Changes in brush width are mostly due to the movement of the brush rather than changes in pressure. The child used varied brush (well, crayon) pressure, which meant that the texszture of the paper could come out; and also used stuff that wasn’t even a brush.

Something else I’ve picked up from watching kids paint: younger artists use black as a focus in their art quite often, as the topmost layer of ink or paint. It’s the “finishing touch”, to them. Older artists tend to use it at a backdrop, or as the inked line-art between the details, instead. To them, it’s the “basis of the work”.

The kid’s way of doing it seemed wrong to me at firest, and it was all I could do not to say “No! You’re obscuring all the lovely detail with this dark funk you’re slathering over it!”

Although that’s another explanation – they’ve worked their way through all the interesting colours in the limited palette they’re given, and by the time they get to the boringest, black, they’re bored of the picture, so just slather it around boredly. And stamping with that round circley thing must’ve been definitely fun enough to get carried away with :D

So it seems evident that, most likely, your pet monkey could not have painted that.

Yeah, but if you had two pet monkeys, you’d have a better than even chance one of them could have (65.56%). I am not sure if that’s great evidence for justification of a professional career in abstract art.

I think a better way to phrase the results is by saying that professional abstract art has only a 2:1 chance of being judged as better art than the psuedo-random smearings of a not-fully developed mind.

Unless you’re being judged by amatuers.

(Also, there’s a slightly lower chance your picture will actually be liked more).

Without paying for the login to see the full study, the Psych Today article reads like people were just told to make judgment calls about which painting in a pair was subjectively better. Psych Today doesn’t make it clear that the subjects were instructed to specifically choose the one painted by a professional. The setup explained implies that the subjects are simply *going* to pick the painting they think was done by the professional. What if one of the subjects purposefully thought one of the two paintings actually was painted by a child and actually thought that one was better?

I think the experimental setup would call for presenting people with pairs of paintings and asking them which they thought was painted by a professional and which they thought was painted by one of the other four. You could still use the same “No Label” “Correct Label” and “Incorrect Label” schema.

A chimpanzee is not a monkey.

Read the quoted excerpt: the professional paintings were compared with those of chimps AND monkeys (and gorillas and elephants and human children).

Granted, if you only read Cory’s headline and first sentence it does kind of sound like he made that error.

Note that the numbers in parentheses are standard deviations; three quarters of those numbers include 50% within a single standard deviation, and I don’t think there’s a single value on that chart that doesn’t fall inside a 95% confidence interval.

So basically what this study says is that in a sample of about thirty people, they found a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.

So it says nothing. Why is this newsworthy?

Citing a scientific study is, on the internet, like bringing out the big guns. It lends a strong weight of credibility to your argument. I think it’s dishonest to do so when the evidence you’re citing is less concrete than the argument you’re making.

The original post by Cory said nothing about doubts or uncertainties. It didn’t even gloss over them, it just left them to the conscientious observer to notice in the table.

So basically what this study says is that in a sample of about thirty people, they found a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right. So it says nothing. Why is this newsworthy?

Um, what? That would be extremely newsworthy. Don’t make the mistake that failing to reject the null hypothesis makes something non-interesting.

On the contrary, I assume that the vast majority of art professors and critics would roundly scoff at the notion that “real” art could be confused with children’s scribbles at an almost equal chance. This study, if the results were solid and valid, could theoretically dismantle huge implicit assumptions in the art world. It’s the other result — that the difference were statistically significant — that would be yawn-o-rama. Indeed, I rolled my eyes at the headline of this post, thinking “of course.” And then I read how close the results actually were.

That said, this result does not prove anything one way or the other. A tiny sample size, almost guaranteed bias in choosing which children’s and animal pieces to use, and a weird methodology means that this study proves just about nothing right now. But, if these weak results did hold up, then it would be pretty bad for the abstract art world.

Up to now I’ve always thought it was hyperbole when people say that a chimp could draw better, but this study shows that for an unbiased viewer it’s true a third of the time.

I think an interesting way to redo the test would be to take three paintings by professional artists and three by chimps and have people put them in order from best to worst.

Am I reading it wrong, or does this study basically prove that, if you deliberately choose paintings that look like monkey drawings, it’s difficult to tell them apart?

Awesome. I hope I can see baby children next time I go to the zoo.

For the non-label comparison, artists and non-artists preferred the ‘real’ art 13% and 6% (respectively) more than would be expected if the two pieces were equally good.

Simply looking at the techniques should easily show who the ‘true’ artist is. Elephants aren’t good at delicate brushwork.

Wow, those artists must be really good…

I hope laymen would prefer my work rather more than 6% more often than that done by a child/chimp/elephant.

If it wasn’t for those pesky child labour laws, I’d employ a staff of 4-year olds and get them churning out art tomorrow. If only elephants had opposable thumbs – we’ve clearly been missing out on their hidden talents. Maybe those cave drawings of mammoths were actually self-portraits.

Just sayin’