A Six-Point Program for Writing Better Visual Arts

[Auroni]

I originally posted this thread a while ago in the private discussion forum for the 2016 NASAT. After some requests, I'm reposting it here for a wider audience now that the set is clear, because it offers some very clear pointers to writers and editors for producing better visual arts.

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.

[gyre and gimble]

I agree with all of Auroni's points more or less, but I wanted to comment on one in particular that I think needs some qualifying:

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.

I don't believe there's any need for a guiding principle that directly addresses the relative amounts of "detail" clues versus "context" clues. The best guiding principle is to use clues that are important and helpful. Those standards are vague, but if a writer can present a good-faith justification for why he or she included a clue (visual or otherwise) we should accept that the clue belongs in the question. These justifications can be quite varied. For example, a visual element could be important because:

• it's been the subject of academic discussion and debate (like the angle of Adam's foot in the Ghent Altarpiece);
  it enhances the understanding of the work through, for example, its symbolism (like the statue of Janus in A Dance to the Music of Time)
  it is simply visually striking, unusual, and/or memorable (like the pointillist border around A Sunday Afternoon);
  even if it isn't especially important in the context of a particular work, it illustrates a recurring facet of the artist's oeuvre (like blueprints, mannequins, or bunches of bananas in any number of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico);
  any combination of the above (which is itself not by any means an exhaustive list).

Ultimately, the standard is the same for non-visual clues. This may all be compatible with what Auroni is saying. I just want to be clear that writers shouldn't necessarily be thinking about trying to balance details with context. Just choose what's important, and the tossup will reward the right kinds of knowledge.

That said, here are a few rules of thumb that I tend to follow:

1. When it is difficult to find an objective way to describe a visual element, description might not be the best route. For example, how can you describe the visual details of Willem de Kooning's Excavation in a way that players can comprehend? The answer is that you can't. So instead you include a short, inevitably vague description that might reference the background white and disorganized array of black lines, with splashes of other colors here and there. The crucial thing is that you then make the clue playable by anchoring the description to, for example, the work's historical importance as one of the earliest examples of all-over abstraction.

2. When in doubt about the relative importances of a detail clue and a context clue, err on the side of the detail clue. Because it comes from the "primary source," more people are likely to have engaged with it so the clue will be more accessible. Chances are much higher that no one converts the context clue.

Finally, I'd like to offer one more way to make visual arts questions better: DO NOT impose your subjective perception of a visual element onto the players. An individual writer might think that a particular shade of red in a painting is "violent." But that word is unintelligible to the players, who do not have the painting in front of them to help them understand what exactly is meant by "violent red." (Assuming, of course, that the writer was correct in calling the red "violent" in the first place.) Instead, say "bright red" or "deep red," or if you want to connote violence, maybe "blood red." Say something that can be understood objectively and in a way that does not depend on knowing the rest of the painting's context first.

To take an example from NASAT (though I don't think this was a pervasive issue there), the leadin to the bonus on Veronese describes a detail in The Feast in the House of Levi as "a tense stare-off between a cat under a table and a dog." Nothing about that detail feels tense to me. It's just a dog and cat looking at each other. Neither perception is automatically right, but that's precisely my point: If the writer unilaterally decides that there is tension in this detail, players will be led to search their brains for paintings with tense details, and their search will come up empty if they don't consider this particular detail to be tense.

As another example, the Rubens tossup says that "a brutish man prepares to slam dunk a baby." What does a "brutish man" look like? And what does it mean to "slam dunk a baby"? If someone doesn't have The Massacre of the Innocents in front of them, should we expect them to understand what these words mean? I understand why a writer would find it helpful to use the word "brutish." It makes sense thematically; the man is a brute because he is about to hurl an infant to the ground. But then the word doesn't add anything, because the question already says what he is doing to the baby. Alternatively, if the question didn't say that, then the word "brutish" on its own is vague and confusing. Either way, the word is unhelpful. To the extent that "brutish" is intended to evoke the man's physical characteristics, it's better to articulate what those characteristics are that evoke the label "brute."

The bottom line is, if you're writing a question, you will naturally be tempted to filter a work's visual elements through your own eyes, because that would be the perfectly and precisely evocative description that you would want to hear when playing that question. But you're not the intended audience, and you shouldn't expect everyone to see the work the same way you do.

[vinteuil]

This is a good laying-out of the stuff that good visual arts editors do. I hope that future editors and writers will use it as a guide, with one change: 1/1 non-Western art seems pretty paltry to me at any higher difficulties. (If you can toss up Corot, you can definitely find more than one non-European visual arts topic to toss up.)

One thing I think needs some clarification:

- Situating every painting, sculpture, and architecture question within the context of the art historical narrative.
- Representing major artists by using their thematic motifs as an anchor.

I like "clues from art historians" and "deep cuts from major artists" a whole lot too, but I think these principles can easily be used to justify questions that are beyond the pale in terms of difficulty (by far NASAT's biggest overall problem):

One of these figures stands on the back of a satyr in a collaborative painting by Jan Bruegel the
Elder and Rubens. In a fresco removed from the Villa Lemmi, they present gifts to Giovanna degli
Albizzi. Renaissance artists modeled their paintings of these figures on a Roman statue of them in Siena
Cathedral. Erwin Panofsky theorized that Raphael's Vision of a Knight formed a diptych with a painting
in which these nude figures alternately face toward and away from the viewer, holding apples. Cupid
trains an arrow on these figures in a painting in which they gather to the left of a red-clad Mercury and
dance in a circle in an orange grove. For 10 points, name these three attendants of Venus who appear in
Botticelli's La Primavera.
ANSWER: the Three Graces [or Charites; or Gratiae]

(The third-to-last sentence is from a Panofsky essay—"Hercules am Scheidewege"—that hasn't been translated into English yet, although, as the Wikipedia page for the painting shows, English-speaking art historians have responded to it.)

That said, I'm not exactly a paragon of difficulty control myself, so I get the impulse here.

[Auroni]

I'll fully cop to overstepping the bounds of NASAT difficulty at points (such as in the Graces question) in my drive to showcase how interesting arts can be. I also don't think that a little bit of unobtrusive editorializing to make questions 1% more interesting to read and to hear is that harmful, although as Stephen points out, you don't want to present the majority of your clues to your audience that way.

[Ike]

This an excellent post with some tips on how to write arts if you're a competent writer trying to add painting to your repertoire. I find Stephen's post excellent too -- I spend / have spent a lot of time removing subjective / incorrect wording from painting questions, and it's something that would save me a lot of time if people got what was going on in a painting right. At times it is harmless - I think the usage of "brutes" in Stephen's example is pretty harmless, but I would definitely be confused by the wording of the "slam dunk" clue. For what it's worth, QB has gotten much better about subjective clues, I distinctly remember playing a tossup on The Gates to Hell that began "One figure in this work appears to be masturbating" - that's purely subjective and isn't useful.

I think what I'm about to say underlies Auroni's and Stephen's posts, which is, that art questions should move beyond the painting. Visual details are important, but you're not getting the full story of art unless you read some scholarship and context on it. Rewarding that kind of knowledge is in my opinion a worthwhile endeavor in QB. I say this because when I started learning about painting for QB I thought the PRB was the shit for making beautiful paintings and that Alma-Tadema* was actually a good artist. As it turns out, I was wrong, and if you're embarking on your adventure to learn painting for the first time I think it's more enriching (for your own edification and for the questions you are producing) to try to learn the "story of art" instead of "beautiful art" or even "art."

Also, yeah some of these NASAT questions are hard, but that's probably because NASAT is a tournament that no one knows WTF the difficulty should be anyway.

*This is my biannual reminder to you, Mr. Carson, that while Alma-Tadema is "fun", he certainly isn't very good.