Monkeys get a silver in Abstract Art Olympics

TL;DR

This study compares preferences for abstract art and animal art among students and relates it to judging biases in figure skating, suggesting that the difference in art preferences is similar to that in sports judging.

Contribution

It introduces a novel comparison between art preferences and sports judging biases, highlighting the relative differences in perceived quality.

Findings

Art students prefer abstract art over monkey art in about two-thirds of cases.

The preference difference in art is comparable to the bias between gold and silver medalists.

Abstract art's perceived superiority is less pronounced than the difference between top sports medals.

Abstract

Experiment shows that art students prefer abstract art to monkey art in about two-third of the cases. Since the number is above 50%, some argue that abstract art is different and better than animal art. I compare this result with figure skating competitions, where on average 73% of judges prefer gold medalist to silver medalist. This means that the difference between abstract artists and animal artists is less than the difference between gold and silver medalists.