Lateral Thinking Quiz

Artists do not require lateral thinking. This for me is one of their attractions. As it happens, I was given a list of 22 lateral questions to answer today. Here are some, though heavily tweaked by me for the attempted benefit of the aforementioned artists.

1. Why can’t an artist living in downtown New York, who is a very good painter, technically as well, especially with acrylic on canvas, and who loves his work dearly, to the point of obsession, be buried in London?

2. If a plane carrying a bunch of chattering and over-perfumed artists and art dealers to the Basel Art Fair with a well experienced pilot at the controls and on a beautiful clear day crashed on the Italian/Swiss border, where would you bury the survivors?

3. An artist lives on the tenth floor of a block of flats and every morning she takes the lift down to the ground floor – admiring some of the graffiti on her way - and goes to her studio. In the evening, often covered in paint, she gets into the lift again, and, if there is someone else in the lift she goes back to her floor directly. Otherwise, she goes to the eighth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to her flat. How do you explain this?

4. How many birthdays does a typical female artist have?

5. A collector has 15 Joseph Albers paintings – the man who introduced theory to modern art. Anyway, all but 8 of the paintings owned by the collector are destroyed in a terrible blaze in a warehouse in Europe. How many Joseph Albers paintings does the collector have left?

6. An artist wanted to get away from it all because he claimed he had had enough of his fellow man, and he built a rectangular studio, each side of the studio having a southern view. He spotted a bear one day – though he was not a wildlife artist. What colour was the bear?

7. If you were a really poor Dutch artist who painted oils and you really wanted to do some work and you were alone in a deserted studio at night, and there was an oil lamp, a candle and firewood and you only had a match, which would you light first?

If you get more than 50% of these correct you are obviously strong on your artists and could make a very good artist’s husband or wife. If you know them already, then I apologise. Call it, if you will, collateral damage.