NASAT 2016: Visual Arts

[Auroni]

As the visual arts subject editor, I wanted to make NASAT the platform for my creative manifesto illustrating how I feel this category should be written. As such, I took an extremely heavy hand with the questions that were submitted by writers. Below are a few key components of my approach:

- Situating every painting, sculpture, and architecture question within the context of the art historical narrative. For the majority of those who were lucky enough to have received formal visual art education in high school, that instruction came in the form of art history courses. These courses are designed to run parallel to other historical courses, examining, at any given point, the interactions between the major artists, their styles, and the world around them. This mode of organization informs several major art history textbooks, such as Stokstad, Janson, and Arnason, and I aspired to make it inform the questions at this tournament. Many of my questions divulged when pieces were created, what contemporary styles they draw from, what larger trends they were part of, among other key context clues. This had the dual purpose of allowing an educated player to use their intuition to narrow down the answer, even if they do not know the specific facts being mentioned about the work.

- Limiting the number of clues about details from artworks, and abandoning such clues altogether if there are none. This point may mark the largest departure between the visual art in this tournament and those of past tournaments. Quizbowl follows a general principle of "describe before naming." However, when it comes to paintings such as landscapes and portraits, this standard rapidly becomes untenable. Because I would rather not disenfranchise two major divisions of painting, I substituted more context clues for unhelpful descriptions for many of these paintings. For instance, the tossup on Modigliani contains no descriptions of his actual portraits, which are bereft of lots of details, but are extremely distinctive. Instead, I opted to use art historical clues placing him in the lively early twentieth century Paris art scene. In tandem, I limited the number of tossups on individual paintings (of which there were two: L'Absinthe and The Oxbow) so that I could spend more time illustrating key facets of artists. Which brings me to my next point:

- Representing major artists by using their thematic motifs as an anchor. Many artists are so important in the Western tradition that should come up at every tournament. However, the need for constant freshness in quizbowl meant necessitating testing for knowledge of these artists creatively, rather than just writing a standard tossup surveying all of their works. So I wrote tossups such as the one on Hell, only from Bosch paintings, or on Leonardo da Vinci, from his Madonnas, or on cafes, from Van Gogh's depictions of them.

- Including content about form, theory, and technique, alongside content about works and their creators. A large part of people's appreciation of art comes from an aesthetic appreciation of the ways in which it is made and the ideas underpinning it, instead of just an isolated admiration for great creators and their products. I tried to explore some of these dimensions in the tossup on 20th century _glass_ sculpture and the film bonuses on Citizen Kane and Sergei Eisenstein.

- Tapping into the social context surrounding art. Many works of art provoke questions about, and are responses to, social issues in the larger world. So with questions like the Mapplethorpe tossup and the sexism in architecture bonus, I tried to illuminate some of these interactions.

- Writing questions on non-Western art. There is a 2/2 allotment for miscellaneous arts in NASAT. I opted to use half this quota, as well as a few key questions in painting and architecture, to carve out a space for visual art from beyond the Western tradition. Because these questions are by definition non-canonical, I had to use my best judgment to gauge their difficulty. I opted for audacity rather than safeness with many of these questions, as I felt that knowledge of world culture incubated among many people playing in this tournament, and that these questions should have the potential to bring that out.

Of course, I wrote and edited plenty of more standard, solid questions too, because it is impossible to completely abandon the mainstream, no matter how aspirational your set is. But I wanted to use this space to give people a glimpse into how the art world operates and thinks in a (hopefully) unobstrusive, non-heavy handed way. Let me know if I succeeded.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

Could the tossup on Bosch's depictions of Hell be posted? I don't remember hearing it so I'm assuming I wasn't playing that round. I enjoyed the visual arts from this set as a whole and found them to be creative and accessible, even with the step away from tossing up specific works/using clues from specific works.

[Auroni]

13. This place is depicted in the bottom left of four small circles surrounding a larger circle styled as the Eye of God in a "tabletop" at the Prado. A doorway leading to this place is lined with toads in another painting. In a depiction of this place, a figure carrying mortar scales a ladder to climb a tower under construction. A depiction of this place includes a musical fragment inscribed on bare buttocks, a giant knife protruding through ears, and a "tree-man" whose torso is formed from a broken eggshell. An enormous cart hurtles off towards this place in the triptych The Haywain. For 10 points, name this place depicted in the right panels of Bosch's The Last Judgment and The Garden of Earthly Delights, a nightmarish realm.
ANSWER: Hell <Gupta>

[Auks Ran Ova]

13. This place is depicted in the bottom left of four small circles surrounding a larger circle styled as the Eye of God in a "tabletop" at the Prado. A doorway leading to this place is lined with toads in another painting. In a depiction of this place, a figure carrying mortar scales a ladder to climb a tower under construction. A depiction of this place includes a musical fragment inscribed on bare buttocks, a giant knife protruding through ears, and a "tree-man" whose torso is formed from a broken eggshell. An enormous cart hurtles off towards this place in the triptych The Haywain. For 10 points, name this place depicted in the right panels of Bosch's The Last Judgment and The Garden of Earthly Delights, a nightmarish realm.
ANSWER: Hell <Gupta>

I like this question a lot, but I have a minor complaint: "hurtles off" is a really odd choice of words in the last Haywain clue, since the cart is being physically dragged from the front by a bunch of demons and followed very closely by a procession of people mostly on foot. It's unlikely to materially affect anything as far as how the question plays out, but it's always better to avoid unnecessary inaccuracy!

[Auroni]

13. This place is depicted in the bottom left of four small circles surrounding a larger circle styled as the Eye of God in a "tabletop" at the Prado. A doorway leading to this place is lined with toads in another painting. In a depiction of this place, a figure carrying mortar scales a ladder to climb a tower under construction. A depiction of this place includes a musical fragment inscribed on bare buttocks, a giant knife protruding through ears, and a "tree-man" whose torso is formed from a broken eggshell. An enormous cart hurtles off towards this place in the triptych The Haywain. For 10 points, name this place depicted in the right panels of Bosch's The Last Judgment and The Garden of Earthly Delights, a nightmarish realm.
ANSWER: Hell <Gupta>

I like this question a lot, but I have a minor complaint: "hurtles off" is a really odd choice of words in the last Haywain clue, since the cart is being physically dragged from the front by a bunch of demons and followed very closely by a procession of people mostly on foot. It's unlikely to materially affect anything as far as how the question plays out, but it's always better to avoid unnecessary inaccuracy!

Fair enough; I thought it would be a good way to convey its chaotic movement, but apparently my word choice was imprecise. I will fix it for future mirrors.

[Auks Ran Ova]

Fair enough; I thought it would be a good way to convey its chaotic movement, but apparently my word choice was imprecise. I will fix it for future mirrors.

Well, there's not really any chaotic movement there--there's definitely a whole lot going on in the painting, but it's not particularly dynamic. There's a guy sitting on the ground with his leg through the spokes of one of the wheels! If you're looking for a new word, I might go with "trundle" or "proceed" or something.

[Ike]

So I, like Rob, like this question too. But I want to nitpick on something that caused me to mentally neg when I read this to myself: You wrote "A depiction of this place includes a musical fragment inscribed on bare buttocks, a giant knife protruding through ears, and a 'tree-man' whose torso is formed from a broken eggshell." That sentence is correct, but it's also true of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" as a location, since you might say "Hieronymus Bosch's depiction the place The Garden of Earthly Delights includes a musical fragment inscribed on bare buttocks, a giant knife protruding through ears, and a 'tree-man' whose torso is formed from a broken eggshell." I think a better way to write this would be to say something such as "In another painting, this location is shown having a musical fragment inspired inscribed on bare buttocks, a giant knife..." since the sentence "In another painting, the location The Garden of Earthly Delights, is shown having a musical fragment..." would strictly be wrong.

Ike

[Auroni]

Did you one further and changed it to "In another painting, details found in this specific place include..."

[Zealots of Stockholm]

Are questions with answerlines such as many of the ones used at NASAT typical of a regular difficulty collegiate set, or was NASAT more of an "experiment" in that regard? In other words, are there more standard answerlines on paintings/artists (like "Ox Bow," 'L'Absinthe," and "Chagall" from this set) in most sets, or should I grow to expect questions such as the ones from NASAT?

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I liked the visual arts at this tournament a lot. The tossups were rather challenging, but also very rewarding to get buzzes on. I do think tossing up Camille Corot was a bit excessive, but apart from that the answers seemed well-chosen and executed.