Deck 23: The Contemporary Contour

Question 1

What is the main characteristic of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao ?

A) creative use of reinforced concrete
B) vertical lines with no ornamentation
C) classical columns and pediments
D) free-flowing geometric shapes

Answer 1

D

Question 2

What is the name given to the kind of art exemplified by Alexander Calder's The Star ?

A) ready-made
B) mobile
C) combine
D) collage

Answer 2

B

Question 3

Which American abstract expressionist is famous for his action paintings?

A) Frankenthaler
B) Pollock
C) Rothko
D) Rauschenburg

Answer 3

B

Question 4

What is the topic of Elie Wiesel's memoir,  Night ?

A) his experience of being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust
B) his childhood in inner-city Chicago
C) his experiences as a soldier in the U.S. army during World War II
D) his memories of covering the Vietnam War as a reporter for Time magazine

Question 5

In Bill Viola's The Crossing, what happens to the human figure?

A) It is transformed into light.
B) It is covered in red paint.
C) It is attacked by fire and water
D) It is pixelated into tiny spots of color.

Question 6

What type of art is exemplified by Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty ?

A) found art
B) ready-made
C) land art
D) combine

Question 7

What contemporary building can be described as "exoskeletal"?

A) the American Center in Paris
B) the Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture
C) the Seagram Building
D) the Guggenheim Museum in New York

Question 8

Which of the following was among the most prominent subjects of Andy Warhol's art?

A) celebrities
B) women
C) cities
D) landscapes

Question 9

What is the subject of Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ?

A) the Native-American experience
B) racism and African-American life
C) the history of African slaves
D) the marginalization of American men

Question 10

In the 1940s and 1950s, what city replaced Paris as the center of modern art?

A) New York
B) London
C) Milan
D) Prague

Question 11

Who designed the extremely symmetrical and sleek Seagram Building?

A) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson
B) Michael Graves
C) Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright
D) Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano

Question 12

What is distinctive about Mark Rothko's paintings?

A) They borrow heavily from Greek art.
B) They arrange figures in pyramidal form.
C) They focus on natural settings.
D) They use large fields of solid color.

Question 13

According to Sartre, what was the purpose of existentialism?

A) to preserve past traditions
B) to help people live in an absurd world
C) to create a standard system of ethics
D) to strengthen people's religious faith

Question 14

What major public outdoor memorial was designed by Maya Ying Lin?

A) Holocaust Memorial
B) Oklahoma City National Memorial
C) Vietnam Veteran's Memorial
D) Slavery Memorial

Question 15

Which disciple of Louis Sullivan was one of the most influential American architects of the 20^th century?

A) Frank Lloyd Wright
B) Philip Johnson
C) Robert Venturi
D) Denise Scott Brown

Question 16

What did the artists Christo and Jean-Claude do for one of their most famous works?

A) They painted murals on public buildings.
B) They erected large cloth panels in public spaces.
C) They built sculpture from garbage.
D) They used their bodies in a staged setting.

Question 17

What artistic form is Robert Rauschenberg most known for?

A) self-portraiture
B) found art
C) kinetic sculpture
D) combine painting

Question 18

What is the best-known play by Samuel Beckett?

A) Waiting for Godot
B) A Doll's House
C) Louisa Miller
D) Death of a Salesman

Question 19

What Swedish artist is known for his oversized sculptures of everyday objects?

A) Le Corbusier
B) Oldenburg
C) Warhol
D) Kierkegaard

Question 20

Which French writer and thinker (1905-1980) is most directly associated with Existentialism?

A) Baudelaire
B) Descartes
C) Sartre
D) Braque

Question 21

What are the origins of Deconstructivist Architecture? How are its principles evident in Frank Gehry's design of the Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ?

Question 22

Who were some of the most famous Beat writers, and what were the major themes of their work?

Question 23

What is aleatoric music?

A) music that uses real sounds from nature
B) music in which chance plays an important role
C) highly structured compositions
D) music used specifically for psychological treatment

Question 24

___________ was an Algerian-born writer who did not want to be called an existentialist.

A) Alberto Giacometti
B) Miguel de Unamuno
C) Albert Camus
D) Jasper Johns

Question 25

Which artist did away with any brushstrokes in color-field painting by pouring paint directly onto the canvas?

A) Helen Frankenthaler
B) Mark Rothko
C) Joan Mitchell
D) Lee Krasner

Question 26

Cite three socially conscious musicals and identify the issue each addresses.

Question 27

What anonymous arts collective of the 1980s called itself the "conscience of the art world"?

A) the New Minimalists
B) Le Corbusier
C) the Beat Generation
D) the Guerrilla Girls

Question 28

Who wrote about her native Chicago and was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry?

A) Toni Morrison
B) Maya Angelou
C) Faith Ringgold
D) Gwendolyn Brooks

Question 29

Which artist, who has worked in many mediums, is best known for his series of Cremaster films?

A) Matthew Barney
B) Bill Viola
C) Pierre Boulez
D) Martin Klimas

Question 30

What two major contemporary composers have continued to work with traditional elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm?

A) Reich and Stockhausen
B) Britten and Shostakovich
C) Boulez and Glass
D) Cage and Townshend

Question 31

Which author's best-known books focus on the life of a former high-school basketball star?

A) Norman Mailer
B) Edward Albee
C) Toni Morrison
D) John Updike

Question 32

What were the central characteristics and themes of Pop Art? How are these apparent in Andy Warhol's work?

Question 33

Who is the author of the feminist poem "In Celebration of My Uterus"?

A) Sylvia Plath
B) Shirin Neshat
C) Anne Sexton
D) Faith Ringgold

Question 34

What two American poets wrote from a feminist perspective?

A) Kerouac and Ginsberg
B) Wiesel and Beckett
C) Sexton and Plath
D) Updike and Albee

Question 35

What is the term for works of art that add three-dimensional objects to the canvas?

A) Postmodernism
B) Combine painting
C) Found art
D) Structuralist

Question 36

American writers Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe all helped to develop what genre of writing?

A) absurdism
B) creative nonfiction
C) collage prose
D) photorealism

Question 37

What musical group played their first live U.S. performance on February 9^th, 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show , broadcast nationally on network television?

A) the Beatles
B) Run-D.M.C.
C) the Who
D) the Chantels

Question 38

What term is applied to the music of Steve Reich, which builds lengthy pieces out of multiple repetitions of simple chords and rhythms?

A) serialism
B) minimalism
C) structuralism
D) aleatorialism

Question 39

How does Pierre Boulez' Second Piano Sonata exemplify the ideal of structuralism?  What is the effect of this compositional framework?

Question 40

What type of non-Western music has influenced the work of the minimalist composer Philip Glass?

A) American Indian chant
B) Polynesian percussion and song
C) Ukrainian music written for the Ud
D) Indian tabla and sitar music