I am particularly referencing here this OKCupid quiz, "What Your Taste in Art Says About You". The quiz shows you 36 paintings, in twelve sets of three, and asks you to pick the one you like best of each set of three. It then purports to analyze your tastes in art, and the meaning thereof, on this basis.
Go ahead, take the test. I'll wait.
Agree with your score? (This is mine, by the way.)
There's a problem with this, as there is on many such quizzes. (I know, I know; it's OKCupid, what am I expecting, a scholarly work? Sure, point taken. Work with me here a little.)
You see, there's an important piece of information that the quiz never actually asks, but should probably ask on every set: "Do you actually like ANY of these?" In my case, out of 36 works, there are three that I actually like¹, and four more that I'm sort of OK with but probably wouldn't hang on a wall unless I really badly wanted something, anything that wasn't actually actively hideous, to fill a particular empty space. The other 29? If I bought a house, moved in and found them hanging on the walls, I'd drop them off at Goodwill the next day.
Sure, there are quite a few works in there (largely the Renaissance ones) that are unquestionably of good technical merit, but I find their subject matter utterly uninteresting. (And I've always considered one of the crowning achievements of the Impressionist movement to be the creation of portraits and life scenes as totally devoid of any sense of interest, meaning, or life as their beloved still-lifes. Still life with aubergine. Still life with two aubergines. Still life with three aubergines. Still life with five aubergines, two children and a small dog. Oh merciful Cthulhu, kill me now.)
The inherent design flaw with a quiz like this is that it's a bit like asking whether you'd prefer to have your hands flayed, your kneecaps smashed, your eyes gouged out, or your testicles crushed, and then concluding from your answer that you're into self-mutilation.
[1] For the curious: The ukiyoe portrait on page 1, the carp on page 3, and the Maxfield Parrish-style landscape on page 9, and I'm sort of OK with the first two on page 5, the Islamic tribal tiger on page 8, and maybe the middle piece on page 10. Several pages I didn't actually mark anything at all on, because there wasn't a single piece on the page that's not horrendous.
