Christmas Details 2012
The 2012 Details Competition will be published next Sunday. The golden days of Tom Lubbock's sometimes desperately difficult puzzles at Christmas are over. The difficulty of the Competition has not eased simply because Tom Lubbock died and another person sets the puzzles. It is because the resources for finding the answers have become much more accessible to everyone. So whereas in the early years of the competition the essential resources were a certain amount of scholarship and a good supply reference books or libraries, today all that is needed is the internet, Google and an even more precise software tool which I shall not identify. Sadly this last requires no knowledge of art history whatsoever. Is this dumbing down inevitable? Does anyone care about this apart from me?
Good luck to everyone and I shall look forward to any comments.
Christmas details Competition - A Dog's Life - The Answers
The 2012 Details Competition will be published next Sunday. The golden days of Tom Lubbock's sometimes desperately difficult puzzles at Christmas are over. The difficulty of the Competition has not eased simply because Tom Lubbock died and another person sets the puzzles. It is because the resources for finding the answers have become much more accessible to everyone. So whereas in the early years of the competition the essential resources were a certain amount of scholarship and a good supply reference books or libraries, today all that is needed is the internet, Google and an even more precise software tool which I shall not identify. Sadly this last requires no knowledge of art history whatsoever. Is this dumbing down inevitable? Does anyone care about this apart from me?
Good luck to everyone and I shall look forward to any comments.
Christmas details Competition - A Dog's Life - The Answers
7 comments:
Merry Christmas! I actually don't find any of the Visually similar searches particularly helpful when it comes to art details. For example, from the current dogs comp I could not find 7 details (yet). In fact I only found 2 details thanks to this tool, all the others found/confirmed by browsing my reference books. I suspect one of the details on the current comp might have appeared as detail 1065 (I happen to collect the cuttings, but I suspect I cannot find any for this detail, and was wondering if you could help me, whether you keep a record of the past details). Wishing you a wonderful holiday season.
Hello Galina Merry Christmas to you. If you would like to send an email to vonthoma@yahoo.com from your own email address, I shall be able to discuss this point with you. You are correct, incidentally. Unfortunately, I have lost your email address from last year. Best regards
Competitors will have noticed that the details have not been numbered, so we will have to use our common sense in sending in the answers. Also, the first detail does not actually show part of a dog, but another part of the picture which does indeed contain a dog. This has happened before. Some of the details cannot be discovered using the software which I mentioned in the first post so it is a good thing that competitors will have to use their knowledge of the history of art to obtain a complete set of answers. Good luck to all.
Yes, I too care that many of the Details can be solved with internet tools. A great pity. To me this has always been a time of piles of books, forays to libraries and bookshops, and a moderate amount of art history knowledge.
I have rarely completed the competition but that has never been the point. I don't even like champagne!
I'm finding this one surprisingly difficult, with familiar looking mutts eluding me so far. I'm up to nine. Two are from the same painter, something that Lubbock never did.
I have the competition pages from 1992 to 2000 if you want copies. (I answered your later post) Happy New Year!
The answers to the Christmas Competition were published today, and the winners. Good luck to them! There were no surprises, really. It is always interesting to see the comments from competitors and to learn how many correct entries there were (35). In spite of the software which makes it easy to find answers which I mentioned in an earlier post, it looks as if there is still scope for good old fashioned research using books and libraries. Long may that be the case.
hi there,
could anyone please post here the names of the winners? My friend entrered his results and we are currently abroad...many many thanks
Winners names (in this order) are:
M Bryant
Mr and Mrs D Berry
L Petty
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