Art critics had their moment in the sun on Tuesday night’s Jeopardy! episode, with an entire category in the Double Jeopardy round dedicated to their writings and terminology. (The show has had its fair share of art questions over the years.)
The category came one day too late, unfortunately, for Friday’s champ, Kate Kohn, an artist with a day job as a communications manager. During her two-day run, she told a charming anecdote about how her friends have enlisted her to design their tattoos of everything from “beautiful little delicate flowers” to “extraordinarily fat tigers.” With her $20,000 winnings, she plans to commission an oil painting portrait of herself to hang above her mantel, to live out her dream of being “some sort of feudal lord,” she told Ken Jennings, this week’s host.
Instead, it was Hillary Sebeny, Greg Zona, and returning champ Dane Reighard who tackled the art critic category, which name-dropped the likes of Clement Greenberg and Christopher Knight. The contestants, happily, nailed all five clues—including a Daily Double on which Reighard, the eventual winner, successfully wagered $3,000.
See how well you would have done on the game show below. (This writer speaks from personal experience when she says it’s harder than it looks!) As a bonus, we’ll also throw in the questions from the “Artistic 19th-Century Women” category that aired on October 27—although two of them are about women in opera, not the visual arts.
Here are the clues; highlight the text in black to read the answers and to see how you would have stacked up to the competition. (On iPhone, highlight and select “look up.”)
Double Jeopardy categories included “Art Critics” on the November 10, 2021 episode of Jeopardy!.
Art Critics
$400 clue: “In a 1435 essay, Leon Battista Alberti declared that an art renaissance was occurring in this city of Leonardo.”
What is Florence?
$800 clue: “After seeing a painting by Monet, critic Louis Leroy derisively gave this movement its name.”
What is Impressionism?
$1,200 clue (Daily Double): “Lawrence Alloway is credited with this two-word term for work that uses comic strips, soup cans and the like as subject matter.”
What is Pop art?
$1,600 clue: “Christopher Knight criticizes museums as shortsighted for funding operations by selling art—in museum-speak, this ‘de-‘ verb.”
What is deaccessioning?
$2,000 clue: “Clement Greenberg said the 1943 work Mural showed this man was the greatest painter the U.S. had produced.”
Who is Jackson Pollock?
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Can (Turkey Noodle) (1962). Courtesy of the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and Antonio Homem. © 2019 the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by SOCAN.
Artistic 19th-Century Women
$400 clue: “Camille Claudel is quoted as saying, ‘Excuse the dust on my blouse; I [practice this art form in] marble myself.'”
What is sculpting?
$800 clue (Daily Double): “Married last name of opera art director Cosima; two of her children were named Siegfried and Isolde.”
Who is Wagner?
Jeopardy! showed contestants these photos from 1870 and 1872 of Cosima
Wagner and her children, who included Siegfried and Isolde, as part of a clue.
$1,200 clue: “Modern Woman, a mural done for the 1893 Chicago Expo by this female American in Paris, no longer exists.”
Who is Mary Cassatt?
$1,600 clue: “Helga von Cramm was a youngish maiden when she painted this Alp, whose name means ‘young maiden.'”
What is Jungfrau?
Jeopardy! showed contestants this Helga von Cramm painting, Jungfrau, as part of a clue.
$2,000 clue: “Felix Mendelssohn threatened suicide if this Swedish soprano did not run away to America with him.”
Who is Jenny Lind?