Abbie Jackson here, welcome back to our still-regular column on “gitting gud” at Quizbowl. Last time we heard Abigail Tan’s account of her journey learning history. This time around, our writer is focussing on an area I’m allegedly meant to be half-decent at myself, the arts. Never mind that History of Art is yet another university major I began and did not finish - I find visual art in Quizbowl tends to have an even more restricted “canon” than literature, so it’s one of the more accessible disciplines to pick up as a specialism.
Still, I could hardly call myself an expert, unlike Michael Kohn, of Durham. He’s here to give a fascinating and thorough overview of visual, auditory and “other” fine arts (paintings/sculptures, classical music/jazz, and anything that isn’t quite as neatly niche-able).
One thing I’ll note before I hand over to him - he brings up the QBReader website a number of times. If you’re not already familiar with this website, bookmark it now - it’s both a wonderful resource of quizbowl tossups and bonuses stretching back to 2000, and probably the most fun way to revise quizbowl in your own time - which is to say, playing more quizbowl. Make sure to explore its database and frequency list sections too. Did you know the most frequent pop culture answerline is “Eminem”? On that note, please lose yourself in Michael Kohn’s excellent column.
Introduction
For most regular tournaments, Fine Arts takes up 3/3 of the 20/20 distribution, meaning it is the next biggest area of quizbowl after the ‘big three’ of Science, Literature and History. Fine Arts is split into Visual (painting and sculpture), Auditory (classical music and jazz), and Other (opera, photography, film, architecture, and musicals). These categories usually vary from tournament to tournament - jazz and opera may come under either Auditory or Other. Players will often be good at both visual and auditory fine arts, but this is frequently not so; this contrasts with other categories like literature where specialists will generally have a good command of all 4 literature subcategories.
My route to being a fine arts player is somewhat mixed - I would consider myself a generalist with specialism in literature and some fine arts. I didn’t study auditory fine arts for quiz until the 2023/24 season, and only studied visual fine arts in the second half of that season, having got by on knowing a lot about fine arts generally through exposure. However, a lot of the techniques I learnt for literature and for arts are transferable and certainly, had I wanted to, I could have definitely improved further into the areas of fine arts I cared less about, as well as into OFA.
Getting Started
I would definitely start with visual fine arts, and indeed that’s where I’ll be sourcing a lot of my examples from. This is for a few reasons: firstly, VFA is more accessible and requires less technical knowledge; there are also many classical musicians in quiz who may have a lot of direct experience in actively playing the works mentioned, which makes it easier to remember clues, particularly score clues. Also, flexibility of the distribution leaves AFA/OFA with more variation in what is classed under each (you could have a very jazz-heavy-AFA tournament which would be great for some, but not so much for others), and the OFA distribution is very much up for interpretation.
When I divided up visual fine arts I did this by movement— and by country as well. Movements are usually chronological so you’d end up with something like pre-Renaissance, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, Cubist, Surrealist, graffiti art, and so on. I’d cross-reference this with QBReader hits on artists clued for ‘this country’ - particularly with more contemporary art, or from countries that come up less (Ilya Repin springs to mind as someone you might miss at first glance). Then within each movement, look at the major artists. For those with loads of hits on QBReader, you’re going to want to really study quite a few of their works. Google is quite good for returning the best paintings if you search ‘famous paintings by [insert artist here]’, but you don’t need to know Remedios Varo’s 10th most famous painting (although she is a brilliant artist). It is also worth looking at non-Western art in some depth, particularly East Asian/the Americas— this applies to AFA too (usually there’s 1/1 world music across the set, and these tend to be instrument/music-theory oriented rather than piece-based).
I’d start with either more old arts or more new - I had Isaiah Silvers on my team and he preferred older art, while I prefer more modern stuff, so my learning really started in about 1800. For arts, it is also worth actually looking at the painting, or listening to the pieces of classical music (albums with titles like ‘Essential Bach’, or top 50 opera arias on Spotify, or the oft-lampooned Classic FM Hall of Fame are good starting points). You can do this far more easily than you can read a novel, so it really is worth engaging with the source material rather than just knowing clues.
Moving to Higher Levels
Here’s a factor that is more fine-arts specific than most - if you’re looking at a painting or piece that is considered famous but has very few hits on QBReader, think about why that may be. How would you write a tossup on it? Are there many unique and interesting details that make good clues, or factors in the production of the works? There are many hits for Andy Warhol as a tossup answer, for example, but less so about the Marilyn series, because they’re very hard to clue in depth. Compare this to something like the Ghent Altarpiece that is both incredibly famous, and has several important details/scenes, and several key facts in its history (e.g. the restoration of it a few years ago). For the paintings I studied I just tried to enjoy the art (this is very important), have a general sense of what is going on in the painting, and see if there’s anything particularly important historically or if the people depicted are themselves notable (for example Baudelaire and others appearing in Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio).
If you are going to use Anki (a flashcarding app - see Ben Jones’ previous post on literature for more details), there is a great art deck. So great, they called it Great Works of Art. It won’t be enough to trouble the top VFA players unless you really memorised all the details of a painting, but it’ll give you a good grounding in western art, although it does skew overly towards white men of the past. There are also good textbooks out there— I used the Cambridge Guide to Music for learning some older AFA.
Lastly, some words about OFA and AFA: for music I’d try to get an overview of music history by periods. Who were the famous composers of those periods? What kind of works did they compose? You can then also subdivide by genre: symphonic, piano music, solo instrumental, chamber, or opera. I definitely would recommend engaging with the source material - for opera I’d listen to albums that were ‘highlights’ of certain operas to condense 3+ hours of music into about 1 hour of the most famous arias. Again, context for famous works is as important as any stories they tell or any famous motifs. Did they write it for someone? For an occasion? For jazz I’d definitely encourage you to listen to the most famous albums, particularly for 50s-70s jazz. Editor’s note here: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins. In that order. For earlier jazz, QBReader deals more in the individual ‘standards’ themselves. For ballet, the music and the choreographers are equally important (but there aren’t a huge number of core answerlines, making it fairly easy to cover). For the other visual fine arts (mainly architecture and photography): like ballet they come up less, and they also don’t have that many famous answerlines, so you can get a good sense of them fairly easily and pick up some free points once or twice a tournament.
Now, in the immortal words of some gamer, good luck, and have fun!