Black Dog Blog

Art and personality test. Fun! Even if you hate art, which I sort of consider myself to.

Of the styles of art we picked for the experiment, your answers suggest you like Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

(Not really. It's more that I either hated or was unimpressed by more or less everything in there.)

In the personality profile you had a high intellectualism score, which suggests you like to think about abstract ideas and have a creative imagination.

People who are the same age and sex as you are most likely to prefer Impressionism
People who also score highly in your dominant personality trait are most likely to prefer Impressionism

[Personality results:]
Average extraversion [WHAT]
Average agreeableness [WHAT]
Average conscientiousness
Average emotional stability
High intellectualism
Average emotional intelligence [WHAT!]

I was disappointed that it separated the questions into "do you like this" and "how talented do you think the artist is", for some of which I gave widely different answers (I loved the black squares, but any fool, dingbat or child process can draw black squares), but then seemed to lump the answers back together agan.

So, how do you judge art? My criteria are pretty unsophisticated. I thought about what I was thinking about while rating those, and here's a rough schema, roughly weighted.

Overall: is it colours I like? (or if black and white, is there plenty of grey OR are the lines at least very clean?) Is it shapes I like? Can I tell what it is at a glance? (important) (if it's abstract, that's a "no") Is it NOT very busy? (important)
Subject: is it a painting of something? (important) Is something happening in the painting? Is there a prominent animal? (very important)
Style: is it in a realistic style? (important)

Generally, only if the answer to most of the above is "yes" will I give it more than a brief glance. But prominent animal auto-wins at least a slightly longer look.

I can count the pictures I actually liked on one hand: the tree-shade with the glasses, the winter mountains with dogs, the volcano and two sets of abstract black squares. And the cubist calf, but only because it's an animal and the artist seemed to get animals.

There's also a synaesthesia test, and lots more, but the synaesthesia one is useless because it doesn't differentiate finely enough. I don't colour letters or numbers, but do colour the odd-numbered weekdays moderately strongly and very consistently…