MS.

TRANG LE THU – GRADE 10 MAINSTREAM READING PRACTICE

WEEK 9 – UNIT 3: CITY SOUTIONS

Vocabulary Practice: Write a word from the box next to its synonyms or definition.

geometric context balance exposed to

violated pursue imperfect

1. Children who are exposed to books at an early age often tend to be better students
than those who are not.

2. The poet E. E. Cummings often made up his own words, violated many of the rules
of spelling and typography, and reinvented rules of grammar, but despite their non-traditional form,
his poems were popular with many readers.

3. Passengers flying over the Midwestern region of the United States often comment on how
geometric thelandscape below appears, with its straight roads, rectangular fields, and perfect
green circles cause by a form of irrigation called center-pivot.

4. He decided to drop out of business school and persue a career as a photographer.

5. Virtually all diamonds are imperfect ; nearly all contain tiny flaws known as inclusions.

6. This new biography of the author Mark Twain explains the historic and literary
context in which he wrote his most famous books, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

7. The rule of thirds is an essential photography technique that can be applied to any subject
to improve the composition and balance of your images.

Reading Practice: Read the passage. Then look at the statements and write:

TRUE if the statement is the same as information in the passage

FALSE if the statement is different from information in the passage
NOT GIVEN if there is no information about this in the passage

A CHILD COULDN'T PAINT THAT

Can people tell abstract art from a child's or chimp's work?

If you wander through New York's Museum of Modern Art, you'll eventually come across
Painting Number 2 by Franz Kline - a set of thick, unruly black lines on a white canvas.
Elsewhere, you will find one of Mark Rothko’s many untitled works, consisting of various colored
rectangles. And in front of both paintings, you will inevitably find visitors saying, "A child could
paint that." To which Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner replied: "Could they?"

In a series of experiments, Psychologists Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner, along with
their colleagues at Boston College, asked hundreds of art outsiders to evaluate works by famous
abstract expressionists. They wanted to find out if people without much, or any, exposure to
abstract art might still be able to detect the intentionality and skill in the abstract paintings of
masters over those created by children or even animals.

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MS. TRANG LE THU – GRADE 10 MAINSTREAM READING PRACTICE

The experimenters began by asking themselves, how do people evaluate abstract art, often
described as "pictures of nothing"? People have little difficulty judging the skill of artists who
make realistic paintings but evaluating skill in those who paint or sculpt non-representationally
is far more subjective. Works by 20th century abstract expressionists have often been likened -
sometimes disapprovingly, sometimes positively - to children's paintings. Though many art
critics assert that the scribbles of abstract artists are distinct from those made by children, the
superficial similarity between abstract expressionist works and markings by preschoolers has
led to embarrassing confusions. The mother of two-year-old toddler Freddie Linsky managed to
dupe the art world by selling her son's work - including a splash of ketchup on a high chair - on
Saatchi Online (admittedly, for a paltry £20). A chimp called Congo fared much better, selling
off three paintings for £12,000 at Bonhams auction house, fetching more than did paintings by
Warhol or Renoir.
Hawley-Dolan and Winner recruited 32 art students and 40 psychology students and asked them
to view and evaluate a display of 30 pairs of paintings. One piece of each pair was the work of
a recognized artist, such as Kline, Rothko, Cy Twombly, Gillian Ayre, and more. The other came
from lesser-known "painters," including preschool children, elephants,
chimps, gorillas, and monkeys. The paintings were matched according to color, line quality,
brushstroke and medium. The students were asked two questions: Which image do you like
more and why? Which image do you think is the better work of art and why?

Both groups of students preferred the professional pieces to the amateur ones, and judged
them to be superior. Even the psychology students, who had no background in art education,
felt the same way, although as you might expect, their preference for the professional works
was slightly weaker. Throughout the experiments, the students typically picked the
professional pieces between 60% and 70% of the time. These aren't overwhelming majorities,
but they were statistically significant. It shows most people were picking up on a more
sophisticated style in the works of famous painters. On average, the participants could
determine that a child could not "paint that," even if first glances might suggest otherwise.
Hawley-Dolan and Winner also wanted to assess the effect that "labeling" has on how a person
appraises a piece of art. In other words, if a painting by a monkey is labeled as being the work
of a famous artist, will it be more favorably appraised?

On the whole, Hawley-Dolan and Winner found that it didn't matter if the students were duped
into thinking that the paintings came from the wrong "artist." The researchers correctly labeled
the pairs of paintings on some of the tests (artist, child, monkey, or elephant) and mislabeled
them on others. Even with these tags, most students still preferred the actual professional
painting. This goes against an earlier experiment by Ulrich Kirk, who found that people find
paintings to be more aesthetically pleasing when they're labeled as having come from a
gallery, rather than having been generated by computers. But this study did not involve paired
comparisons. Hawley-Dolan and Winner think that such side-by-side judgments are better
ways of telling if people can discriminate between pieces produced by different painters.
When asked why they made their choices, both groups of students speculated about what the
artist was trying to achieve, or what was going through their mind at the time. They saw more
of such intentions in the professional pieces than in the more random shapes of the children
and animals. As Hawley-Dolan and Winner write:

"People untrained in visual art see more than they realize when looking at abstract
expressionist paintings. People may say that a child could have made a work by a recognized
abstract expressionist, but when forced to choose between a work by a child and one by a
master such as Rothko, they are drawn to the Rothko even when the work is falsely attributed
to a child or nonhuman. People see the mind behind the art."

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MS. TRANG LE THU – GRADE 10 MAINSTREAM READING PRACTICE

8. Both Painting #2 and Rothko's untitled paintings are given as examples of abstract
expressionism. ____
T

9. Both Painting #2 and Rothko's untitled paintings are brightly colored. F

10. Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner both had strong backgrounds in art. __
NG

11. The author used the expression "pictures of nothing" to refer to the art done by children.
F

12. According to the author, it is easier to judge the skill level of painters who paint still lifes,
portraits, and landscapes than it is of abstract painters. T

13. Freddie Linsky is a well-known artist. F

14. The paintings made by Congo sold for more than those made by Freddy Linsky. T

15. Hawley-Dolan and Winner's research supported the findings from a previous experiment
carried out by Ulrich Kirk. F

16. The psychology students who participated in the experiment were less likely to judge
correctly whether art was created by an artist or a non-artist. T

17. It was possible for the participants who took part in the experiment to determine which
paintings had been made by children and which were made by animals. ____ NG