Tag Archives: lists

I Was Told There Would Be No Math

The time has come to address a concern/comment that comes up regularly in the meta-list universe. As those who read this site regularly know, I create meta-lists in a very simple way: First, I collect as many “Best of ___” lists as I can find. I favor critics’ lists over amateur lists, but I don’t discriminate based on the length of the list – a Top 1000 list is just as good as a Top 10 or Top 5 list. Second, I take each item on each list and give it one point. Then I add up all the points to see which items are on the most lists, and I arrange them accordingly.

There are some in the list-verse who disagree with my methods. The issue arises in two contexts. First, some commenters (and meta-listers) believe in weighting the ratings of each list. For example, they give the number 1 item on a Top Ten list 10 points, with 9 points to the number 2 item, etc. As I explain below, this is an example of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and usually skews the meta-lists in horribly wrong directions. Second, some commenters believe that I shouldn’t combine lists of different lengths or shouldn’t include the lower-rated items from longer lists. For example, it’s OK to give points to all 10 movies from a top 10 list but not to all 1000 movies from a top 1000 list. Once again, this is based on a misunderstanding of a mathematical truth.

Both complaints are based on a simple mathematical fallacy. The commenters believe that they are dealing with a universe that consists of the list and the items on it. If the universe of movies consisted of the 10 movies in a top 10 list, then it would make sense to say that those 10 movies make up 100%. Since the movies are ranked 1 through 10, it would make sense in that universe to take that 100% and divide it up according to the rankings. So, the first movie on the list would get the highest number of points and the rest of the movies should receive percentages based on their rank in the list. In such a case, the difference between the number 1 item on the list and the number 10 item on the list would be HUGE. Also, if you believed that a Top 1000 list was the entire universe of that list, then the difference between item 1 and item 1000 would be even HUGER. In that case, I could see why people wouldn’t want me to give equal points to the items on a Top 10 list (where 100% is divvied up between 10 items) and a Top 1000 list (where 100% is divided up among 1000 items). Those items near the bottom of the Top 1000 list would seem hardly fit to share space on a list with the big numbers of the Top 10 lists. BUT THIS IS ALL WRONG!!!!!

[NOTE: You’ll notice that I didn’t give exact percentages, even for the misguided theory that a list is a universe to itself. That’s because the math is beyond my meager capabilities. That practice of listers who give 10 points to the highest, 9 points to the next, etc., has no basis in math as far as I can tell – it’s the mathematical equivalent of winging it. To get the correct percentage score out of 100% for each ranked item in a top 10 list, you would need to do something like the following:
EQUATION 1: a + b + c + d + e + f +g + h + i + j = 100
“EQUATION” 2: a > b > c > d > e > f > g > h > i > j AND
EQUATION 3: a/100 – b/100 = b/100 – c/100 = c/100 – d/100 = d/100 – e/100 = e/100 – f/100 = f/100 – g/100 = g/100 – h/100 = h/100 – i/100 = i/100 – j/100
Forgive me if I don’t solve for the 10 variables.]

You may be asking now, what is wrong with weighting the ranked items on a list (besides the impossible math)? And how can you possibly give equal points to items on lists of different lengths? Physicists will understand when I say, for the same reason that Newtonian physics works in almost every situation you and I will ever encounter. Because in certain universes, you don’t have to be exactly accurate. The fundamental flaws in Newtonian physics only reveal themselves in rarely-encountered situations, such as near the speed of light.

The problem (really, the solution) is that a list is not a universe. Think of it more as the cream that rises to the top of the milk bottle. You wouldn’t define milk based only on the cream, right? Well, you shouldn’t measure the “best” of something by comparing it to itself, but instead to the entire universe of items that exist. So, taking movies as an example, it is estimated that there are more than 500,000 movies that exist in the world. So when I see a list of the best 10 movies of all time, I am comparing it to those 500,000 movies.

[Some readers may object that the people making these lists haven’t seen every movie, read every book, seen every work of art, etc. If we reject the objective standard, then (using movies as an example) I’d have to know how many movies each lister has seen, so I know the universe we’re dealing with. For example, I have rated 2,355 movies on IMDB.com. If I made a top 100 list, could I only compare it to lists by people who’ve seen 2,355 movies, or could I expand it to people who’ve seen at least 2,355. Or, worst case scenario, would I only be able to compare myself with other listers who have seen exact same 2,355 movies as I have? What would I do about lists made by groups of authors or editors? Would I need to know their specific, unique universe of movies? I believe this approach would make meta-listing obsolete and would rather not go there.]

If there are 500,000 movies, then a Top 10 list contains 0.002% of all movies. The movies on a top 1000 list constitute 0.2% of all movies. While .002% and .2% are very different numbers when compared to each other, they are both well under 1% of all movies ever made and so they are essentially equivalent. Maybe it would be better if I said that I only included lists when the items listed constitute less than the top 1% of the total population of items being rated. In the real universe, then the number 1 movie on a Top Ten list and the 999th movie on a Top 1000 list are equal for all relevant purposes because (assuming 500,000 total movies, which may be low) they are both talking about movies in the top 0.2% of all movies ever made. Sure, there may be slight percentage differences between the ratings on each list, or between lists, but none of the differences even comes close to overcoming the fact that all the items on all the lists are within the top two-tenths of one percent of all movies ever made. I could repeat the experiment using works of art, photographs, musical recordings, works of literature, athletes, famous individuals, inventions, scientific discoveries and other lists, but I won’t.

A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven: A Series of Announcements

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Happy New Year to everyone who follows or otherwise reads Make Lists, Not War. I am thrilled to see that people from around the world have been checking out the lists on this site – every year the numbers grow. I particularly appreciate the comments and suggestions by some of the readers.

1. In this blog post, I have three announcements. The first is that 2015 was the best year so far for Make Lists, Not War since I began blogging in 2013. To give you a sense of the level of activity this year, here are some statistics, courtesy of the diligent folks at WordPress:

Total Views (2015): 60,095
Total Viewers (2015): 35,859

Viewers’ Top 10 Countries of Origin:
(1) United States (29,011 views)
(2) United Kingdom (3,986)
(3) Canada (2,633)
(4) Germany (1,823)
(5) Australia (1,597)
(6) France (1,578)
(7) India (1,237)
(8) Italy (949)
(9) Netherlands (835)
(10) Spain (830)

Top 10 Search Terms
(1) “best operas”
(2) “greatest operas”
(3) “100 great short stories”
(4) “best operas of all time”
(5) “greatest works of art”
(6) “greatest paintings of all time”
(7) “best world music albums”
(8) “greatest architects of all time”
(9) “alfred stieglitz flatiron building 1903 photo reproduction”
(10) “greatest architecture of all time”

2. My next announcement is to introduce five new lists (actually, two two-part lists and one one-part list). Although I had already taken the Best Literature list and organized it by author, I had not made a list of Best Authors. Similarly, I had taken the Best Classical Music list and organized it by composer, but I hadn’t made a list of the Best Composers. I have now filled those gaps in the list-verse. In both cases, I collected lists of the best authors/best composers and combined them into meta-lists. I then made lists of each author/composer on more than two (for authors) or three (for composers) original source lists. In addition, I made a list of each author’s most highly-regarded literary works and for the composers, I made lists of their most highly-regarded music compositions. In the case of the writers, there is a two-part list organized chronologically by author’s date of birth. In the case of composers, there is a list organized chronologically by date of birth and a two-part list organized by rank (i.e., starting with the composer on the most lists). The results of these projects can be found by following the links below:

The Best Writers and their Best Works, Part 1: 850 BCE – 1870
The Best Writers and their Best Works, Part 2: 1871-Present

The Best Classical Composers and their Best Works, Ranked: Part 1
The Best Classical Composers and their Best Works, Ranked: Part 2
The Best Classical Composers and their Best Works: Chronological

3. My third announcement will be mostly of interest to my wife and others who know me personally. While I am devoted to the blog, and have a number of projects in the wings (more pictures! more descriptive/analytical essays!), it is a time-consuming labor of love that sometimes saps time and energy from other necessary activities and pursuits. After researching and creating over 160 lists that will remain fully accessible to viewers around most of the globe, I feel comfortable taking a hiatus from Make Lists, Not War for a significant portion of 2016, after which I hope to return with renewed vigor. Until then, please enjoy these lists and remember to Make Lists, Not War.

John B.

IMHO: My Top Overrated and Underrated Movies

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The idea that a work of art is over- or underrated is a curious one. What does it really mean? I think we often use the terms as a type of shorthand for, “I don’t agree with most of my friends on this [painting, TV show, movie, book, etc.].” Sometimes ‘overrated’ means “this is getting more attention than it deserves in the press, or in winning awards” and ‘underrated’ means it’s not getting enough attention. For me, the problem with all these definitions is that they are so highly subjective – it is easy enough to figure out what your opinion is, or mine, but what exactly are we comparing our opinions to? What your friends like probably differs from what my friends like, so your overrated book may be my underrated discovery. While opinions about the value of a work of art are inherently subjective, I have been wondering if there is a way to quantify objectively the work’s position in the Zeitgeist. Without such an objective standard, our judgments of ‘overrated’ and ‘underrated’ are not only extremely variable but may be based on incorrect assumptions about our audience. An extreme but perhaps not uncommon example is the person who is told again and again that X is overrated, but who has no idea what X is and has never seen it or heard of it before. Maybe the true goal of the speaker in such a case is not to share her opinion and spark debate on the relative value of an artwork but to demonstrate to listeners that she knows much more than they do and is so much more clued in, to the point that she is already sick and tired of all the praise she is hearing for X, something she realizes is not even on the radar for most of her listeners.

In my search for an objective standard to anchor judgments of overrated and underrated, I decided to look first to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). I’ve been a fan of imdb.com since I first discovered it in 1995, when it was already several years old. Although in recent years, it has come to look like a zillion other entertainment sites, lying underneath all the frills is the core of the website: a gigantic database of movies and the people who make them. You can find every movie made by a director, every actor in a particular movie, and a wealth of information about every production. Those who are members of imdb.com are asked to rate each movie they’ve seen on a scale of 1 to 10, and the cumulative scores are published, along with the number of voters. For example, the number of voters giving ratings to movies I’ve seen ranges from a high of 1,546,508 ratings (for The Shawshank Redemption) to a low of 69 ratings for the 1981 music documentary Dance Craze. For this post, I decided to go through the movies I’ve seen and compare my rating with the overall imdb.com rating. I decided that if my rating is more than two points lower than the imdb.com rating, the movie is overrated; if my rating was more than two points higher than imdb‘s, the movie is underrated. I stayed near the top of the lists: the overrated movies all received a 7.0 or higher average rating from imdb.com (the highest rated movies on imdb received a 9.2); to find underrated movies, I looked at all the movies I rated either a 9 or a 10. Just to be clear, even though the overrated movies list includes some films I absolutely hated, inclusion on the list does not necessarily mean I didn’t like the movie. It may just mean that the collective imdb consciousness liked the movie a lot more than I did.

While no system is perfect, I think the average ratings given by compiling hundreds, thousands and in some cases over a million votes should give a pretty good idea of where the Zeitgeist is on a particular movie. It is then a relatively simple process to compare one’s own ratings with the Zeitgeist and see which films are over- and underrated. Although the entire enterprise is based on the subjective opinions of the imdb.com voters and me, there is now an objective method of determining whether one’s opinion is consistent with or divergent from the average. Instead of using an unscientific impression of what our friends think about something, or a vague notion of how much praise something is getting in the press, we can (for movies at least) quickly and easily identify whether an item is overrated or underrated. Here, then, are my lists of overrated and underrated movies, in chronological order.

OVERRATED
(imdb.com = 9.2 – 7.0; Make Lists, Not War = at least 2.1 points lower)

Each Dawn I Die (Keighley, US, 1939)
The Enchanted Cottage (Cromwell, US, 1945)
The Jolson Story (Green, US, 1946)
Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock, US, 1954)
A Journey to the Beginning of Time (Zeman/Ladd, US/Czechoslovakia, 1955)
The Ten Commandments (De Mille, US, 1956)
Operation Petticoat (Edwards, US, 1959)
Village of the Damned (Rilla, UK, 1960)
Pocketful of Miracles (Capra, US, 1961)
Monterey Pop (Pennebaker, US, 1968)
Oliver! (Reed, UK, 1968)
Battle of Britain (Hamilton, UK, 1969)
The Sting (Hill, US, 1973)
Papillion (Schaffner, US, 1973)
The Return of the Pink Panther (Edwards, UK, 1975)
The Pink Panther Strikes Again (Edwards, UK, 1976)
The Omen (Donner, US, 1976)
Star Wars (Lucas, US, 1977)
Grease (Kleiser, US, 1978)
Alien (Scott, US, 1979)
Baby Snakes (Zappa, US, 1979)
Dance Craze (Massot, UK, 1981)
The Thing (Carpenter, US, 1982)
First Blood (Kotcheff, US, 1982)
Return of the Jedi (Marquand, US, 1983)
Terms of Endearment (Brooks, US, 1983)
Trading Places (Landis, US, 1983)
The Princess Bride (Reiner, US, 1987)
Die Hard (McTiernan, US, 1988)
Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore, Italy, 1988)
Major League (Ward, US, 1989)
Field of Dreams (Robinson, US, 1989)
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (Chechik, US, 1989)
Total Recall (Verhoeven, US, 1990)
Home Alone (Hughes, US, 1990)
Ghost (Zucker, US, 1990)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, US, 1991)
Cape Fear (Scorcese, US, 1991)
Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale/Wise, US, 1991)
Aladdin (Clements/Musker, US, 1992)
The Muppet Christmas Carol (Henson, US, 1992)
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, US, 1993)
The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, US, 1994)
Dumb & Dumber (Farrelly, US, 1994)
True Lies (Cameron, US, 1994)
The Lion King (Allers/Minkoff, US, 1994)
Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, US, 1994)
Léon: The Professional (Besson, France, 1994)
The Usual Suspects (Singer, US, 1995)
Primal Fear (Hoblit, US, 1996)
The English Patient (Minghella, US/UK, 1996)
Titanic (Cameron, US, 1997)
Face/Off (Woo, US, 1997)
Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, US, 1997)
Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, US, 1998)
The Matrix (Wachowskis, US, 1999)
Sleepy Hollow (Burton, US, 1999)
The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan, US, 1999)
Meet the Parents (Roach, US, 2000)
Finding Nemo (Stanton/Unkrich, US, 2003)
The Matrix Reloaded (Wachowskis, US, 2003)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (Verbinski, US, 2003)
Collateral (Mann, US, 2004)
Spider-Man 2 (Raimi, US, 2004)
Anchorman (McKay, US, 2004)
Wedding Crashers (Dobkin, US, 2005)
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Apatow, US, 2005)
King Kong (Jackson, US, 2005)
Notes on a Scandal (Eyre, UK, 2006)
The Mist (Darabont, US, 2007)
Ratatouille (Bird/Pinkava, US, 2007)
Atonement (Wright, UK, 2007)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Burton, US, 2007)
WALL-E (Stanton, US, 2008)
Up (Docter/Peterson, US, 2009)
Avatar (Cameron, US, 2009)
The Hangover (Phillips, US, 2009)
Inception (Nolan, US, 2010)
The Help (Taylor, US, 2011)
Super 8 (Abrams, US, 2011)
Source Code (Jones, US, 2011)

UNDERRATED
(ML,NW = 9.0 – 10.0; imdb.com = at least 2.1 points lower)

The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, US, 1914)
The Floorwalker (Chaplin, US, 1916)
One A.M. (Chaplin, US, 1916)
Greed (von Stroheim, US, 1924)
Napoleon (Gance, France, 1927)
Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel & Dali, France, 1929)
L’Age d’Or (Buñuel, France, 1930)
Zero for Conduct (Vigo, France 1933)
L’Atalante (Vigo, France, 1934)
Swing Time (Stevens, US, 1936)
Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, US, 1935)
Stagecoach (Ford, US, 1939)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, US, 1942)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, US, 1944)
Ivan the Terrible, Part I (Eisenstein, USSR, 1945)
My Darling Clementine (Ford, US, 1946)
The African Queen (Huston, US, 1951)
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Tati, France 1953)
The Band Wagon (Minnelli, US, 1953)
The Naked Spur (Mann, US, 1953)
A Star is Born (Cukor, US, 1954)
Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, US, 1955)
Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Eisenstein, USSR, 1958)
The Trial (Welles, France, 1962)
Jules and Jim (Truffaut, France, 1962)
The Servant (Losey, UK, 1963)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, Italy, 1964)
Band of Outsiders (Godard, France, 1964)
Repulsion (Polanski, UK, 1965)
Blow-Up (Antonioni, UK, 1966)
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, US, 1967)
Belle de Jour (Buñuel, France, 1967)
Faces (Cassavetes, US, 1968)
Kes (Loach, UK, 1969)
Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, US, 1969)
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (de Sica, Italy, 1970)
Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, US, 1970)
Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, France, 1972)
Badlands (Malick, US, 1973)
The Conversation (Coppola, US, 1974)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog, W. Germany, 1974)
Nashville (Altman, US, 1975)
3 Women (Altman, US, 1977)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, W. Germany, 1979)
Stardust Memories (Allen, US, 1980)
My Dinner with Andre (Malle, US, 1981)
The King of Comedy (Scorcese, US, 1982)
Local Hero (Forsyth, UK, 1983)
Baby It’s You (Sayles, US, 1983)
Blue Velvet (Lynch, US, 1986)
Raising Arizona (Coen, US, 1987)
Say Anything… (Crowe, US, 1989)
Short Cuts (Altman, US, 1993)
Party Girl (von Scherler Mayer, US, 1995)
I Shot Andy Warhol (Harron, US, 1996)
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (Morris, US, 1997)
Happiness (Solondz, US, 1998)
Being John Malkovich (Jones, US, 1999)
All About My Mother (Almodóvar, Spain, 1999)
Waking Life (Linklater, US, 2001)
Fat Girl (Breillat, France, 2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, US, 2001)
Tarnation (Caouette, US, 2003)
Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, US, 2003)
The Holy Girl (Martel, Argentina, 2004)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore, US, 2004)
Born Into Brothels (Briski/Kauffmann, US, 2004)
Grizzly Man (Herzog, US, 2005)
Once (Carney, Ireland, 2006)
Juno (Reitman, US, 2007)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Mungiu, Romania, 2007)
Food, Inc. (Kenner, US, 2008)
The White Ribbon (Haneke, Austria, 2009)
Take This Waltz (Polley, Canada, 2011)
The Tree of Life (Malick, US, 2011)
Museum Hours (Cohen, Austria, 2012)
Under the Skin (Glazer, UK, 2013)
Inherent Vice (Anderson, US, 2014)
Mr. Turner (Leigh, UK, 2014)
Goodbye to Language (Godard, France, 2014)

If you’re interested in other movie lists, check out these:

Best Films of All Time – The Critics’ Picks (Updated)
Best Films of All Time – Chronological

Designs for Living: Architects and their Best Work

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The purpose of this post is to introduce my newest list – Best Architects of All Time – The Critics’ Picks – but instead of writing a thought-provoking essay, I thought I would provide a sample of some of the most interesting, beautiful, outrageous and, yes, thought-provoking architectural designs ever built. To provide a variety of architectural styles and periods, I created a few fairly obvious categories (churches, museums, bridges, airports, etc.) and posted photos of five different examples of each category. Why five? Not sure, but two wasn’t enough and ten was too many.

Five Castles

Crusading knights renovated a Kurdish fort into Krak des Chevaliers.

Krak des Chevaliers (1170). Architect: Unknown. Location: Near Homs, Syria.

Château de Chambord, in Chambord, France.

Château de Chambord (1547). Architect: Unknown. Location: Chambord, France.

Himeji Castle is a famous Japanese landmark.

Himeji Castle (1581; 1609; 1618). Architect: Unknown. Location: Himeji, Japan.

Palace of Versailles. Architects: Numerous. Location: Versailles, France.

Palace of Versailles (1678; 1684; 1710). Architects: Numerous. Location: Versailles, France.

Neuschwanstein Castle, designed by Irving Reidl, is located in Opferburg, Germany.

Neuschwanstein Castle (1892). Architect: Eduard Reidl. Location: Hohenschwangau, Germany.

Five Single-Family Residences

Palladio's "La Rotunda" was named after the

Villa Capra “La Rotunda” (1566). Architect: Andrea Palladio. Location: Near Vicenza, Italy.

Poplar Forest (1806-1826). Architect: Thomas Jefferson. Location: Near Lynchburg, Virginia.

Poplar Forest (1826). Architect: Thomas Jefferson. Location: Near Lynchburg, Virginia.

Robie House (1909). Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright. Location: Chicago, Illinois.

Villa Savoye is a dramatic revisioning of residential architecture.

Villa Savoye (1931). Architects: Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret. Location: Poissy, France.

Farnsworth House (1951). Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Location: Plano, Illinois.

Five Bridges

Dozens of workers died while building the Brooklyn Bridge, including the architect, John Roebling. He was inspecting the works from a pier across the Hudson when a boat crashed into the dock, crushing his foot. Despite the amputation of his toes, he died two weeks later of a tetanus infection.

Brooklyn Bridge (1883). Architect: John Augustus Roebling. Location: New York, New York.

Tower Bridge (1886-1894). Architect: Sir Horace Jones. Location: London, UK.

Golden Gate Bridge (1937). Architects: Joseph Strauss, Irving Morrow & Charles Ellis. Location: San Francisco, California.

Millau Viaduct (2004). Architects: Norman Foster and Michel Virlogeux. Location: Millau, France.

Bridge of Strings (2008). Architect: Santiago Calatrava. Location: Jerusalem, Israel.

Five Churches (exterior view)

Basilica of San Vitale (547 CE). Architect: Unknown. Location: Ravenna, Italy.

Notre Dame de Paris (1345). Architect: Bishop Sully (attrib.). Location: Paris, France.

Milan Cathedral (1386-1965). Architects: Numerous. Location: Milan, Italy.

Saint-Pierre, by Le Corbusier and José Oubrerie, in Firminy, France.

Saint-Pierre (2006). Architects Le Corbusier and José Oubrerie. Location: Firminy, France.

Crystal Cathedral (1981). Architect: Philip Johnson. Location: Garden Grove, California.

Five Churches (interior view)

Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe (549 CE). Architect: Unknown. Location: Near Ravenna, Italy.

Sainte-Chapelle (1248). Architect: Unknown. Location: Paris, France.

Santa Maria presso San Satiro (1482). Architect: Donato Bramante. Location: Milan, Italy.

Church of Sant’andrea al Quirinale (1670). Architect: Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Location: Rome, Italy.

The interior of St. Paulinus Church in ___, Germany was designed by Balthasar Neumann.

St. Paulinus Church (1753). Architect: Balthasar Neumann. Location: Trier, Germany.

Five Museums

Sir Robert Smirke's original design for the British Museum in London.

British Museum (1847). Architect: Sir Robert Smirke. Location: London, UK.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1959). Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright. Location: New York, New York.

The Menil Collection, in Houston, texas, was designed by Renzo Piano.

The Menil Collection (1987). Architect: Renzo Piano. Location: Houston, Texas.

Quadracci Pavilion, Minneapolis Art Museum (2001). Architect: Santiago Calatrava. Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Quadracci Pavilion, Milwaukee Art Museum (2001). Architect: Santiago Calatrava. Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar.

Museum of Islamic Art (2008). Architect: I.M. Pei. Location: Doha, Qatar.

Five Skyscrapers

The Wainwright Building, by Louis Sullivan and Denkmar Adler, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Wainwright Building (1890). Architects: Louis Sullivan & Denkmar Adler. Location: St. Louis, Missouri.

Flatiron Building (1902). Architect: Daniel Burnham. Location: New York City, US.

Flatiron Building (1902). Architect: Daniel Burnham. Location: New York, New York.

A Kong-free view of the Empire State Building.

Empire State Building (1931). Architect: Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. Location: New York, New York.

Seagram Building (1958). Architects: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & Philip Johnson. Location: New York City, US.

Seagram Building (1958). Architects: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & Philip Johnson. Location: New York, New York.

Burj Khalifa. Architect: X. Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Burj Khalifa (2009). Architect: Adrian Smith/SOM. Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Five Theaters

Sheldonian Hall. Christopher Wren. Oxford, UK.

Sheldonian Theatre (1668). Architect: Sir Christopher Wren. Location: Oxford, UK.

Palais des Beaux-Arts. Victor Horta. Brussels, Belgium.

Palais des Beaux-Arts (1928). Architect: Victor Horta. Location: Brussels, Belgium.

House of Culture. Alvar Aalto. Helsinki, Finland.

House of Culture (1958). Architect: Alvar Aalto. Location: Helsinki, Finland.

Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California.

Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003). Architect: Frank Gehry. Location: Los Angeles, California.

Casa da Musica. Architect: Rem Koolhaas. Location: Porto, Portugal.

Casa da Musica (2005). Architect: Rem Koolhaas. Location: Porto, Portugal.

Five Government Buildings

United States Capitol. Architects: . Location: Washington, D.C.

United States Capitol (1800). Architects: William Thornton and others. Location: Washington, D.C.

Palace of Westminster. Location: London, UK.

Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) (1870). Architects: Charles Barry & Augustus Pugin. Location: London, UK.

The National Congress of Brazil, in the capital city of Brasilia, designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

National Congress of Brazil (1961). Architect: Oscar Niemeyer. Location: Brasilia, Brazil.

The National Assembly building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

National Assembly Building (1982). Architect: Le Corbusier. Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Kuwait National Assembly Building. Jørn Utzon

Kuwait National Assembly Building (1982). Architects: Jørn Utzon & Jan Utzon. Location: Kuwait City, Kuwait.

Five Multi-Family Dwellings

Casa Milà (La Pedrera) (1910). Architect: Antoni Gaudí. Location: Barcelona, Spain.

Unité d’habitation (1952). Architect: Le Corbusier. Location: Marseilles. France.

Nemausus Housing (1987). Architect: Jean Nouvel. Location: Nimes, France.

Nexus World Housing (1991). Architect: Rem Koolhaas. Location: Fukuoka, Japan.

Architect: Santiago Calatrava, Zurich (Switzerland) Project: Turning Torso, office + apartment building, Malmoe (Sweden) Malmö

Turning Torso (2005). Architect: Santiago Calatrava. Location: Malmö, Sweden.

Five Airports

TWA Terminal, John F. Kennedy Airport. Architect: Eero Saarinen. Location: New York City, US.

TWA Terminal, John F. Kennedy Airport (1962). Architect: Eero Saarinen. Location: New York, New York.

Hajj Terminal, King Abdulaziz International Airport (1981). Architect: Fazlur Rahman Khan/SOM. Location: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Terminal 1, Los Angeles International Airport. Architect: Norma Merrick Sklarek. Location: Los Angeles, California.

Terminal 1, Los Angeles International Airport (1982). Architect: Norma Merrick Sklarek. Location: Los Angeles, California.

Kansai International Airport (1994). Architect: Renzo Piano. Location: Osaka Bay, Japan.

Hong Kong International Airport (1998). Architect: Norman Foster. Location: Chek Lap Kok Island, China.

To see my new list of the Best Architects of All Time, click here.

My Kid Could Paint That, But If She Did, I’d Be Concerned: The Contemporary Art List

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When did we decide that some art was modern art? Did modern art began at the dawn of the 20th Century, or some time before? Was Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 the defining moment or was it some earlier work by Matisse or Kandinsky? One would think that modern would stay current, but apparently it got old, and we needed a new term to describe what came after modern. (Does postmodern follow modern? Yes and no. They’re in a relationship and it’s complicated.) The near-universally accepted term for the most recent art and artists is contemporary. We even have museums devoted exclusively to contemporary art. When did we go from modern to contemporary? The term ‘contemporary art’ has been defined in a variety of ways, all of which seek to distinguish newer art and artists from the modernists who came before. Because those Picassos, Matisses and Kandinskys are over 100 years old – and that doesn’t sound very modern, does it? Contemporary is the new modern, but how do we establish boundaries for a present tense that keeps moving into the past?

For some critics and art historians, contemporary art encompasses all the postwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s – Abstract Expressionism (think Jackson Pollock), Neo-Dada/Pre-Pop (think Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) and Pop Art (think Andy Warhol) – and continuing all the way to the present. Others say ‘contemporary’ means art since 1970. Still others define it as art by artists living today, which means that the scope of contemporary art changes every time we see an artist’s obituary. Once we’ve defined the time period covered by ‘contemporary art’, we must try to comprehend not only the artists and their particular works of art, but also struggle with what generalizations we can make about the various means, techniques, movements and ideas employed by these artists (and by the critics, curators and historians who think and write about them). As an example of the difficulties involved in making such generalizations, consider just a few of the contemporary art ‘movements and styles’ identified by the obsessive-compulsive folks at Wikipedia: environmental art, holography, postminimalism, wildstyle, froissage, culture jamming, transgressive art, transavantgarde, neo-expressionism, hyperrealism, pseudorealism, toyism, stuckism, superflat and metamodernism. Where to find an umbrella big enough to cover all these and many more disparate paradigms?

Considering the breadth of contemporary art, it is foolish (even dangerous) to attempt generalizations. We can only point to some common trends. It is almost a cliché to say that contemporary artists seek to challenge our understanding of what art is and can be and what the artist’s role is in ‘creating’ the art, but many contemporary artists are interested in exploring (and challenging assumptions about) the nature of art – what is art?, is this art? They also like to draw attention to (and challenge our assumptions about) the nature of the creative process and the relationship between the artist and the person who interacts with the artwork, or buys the artwork. While some contemporary artists create works of art that require sophisticated artistic skills, others deemphasize technical skill and instead focus on what is simple, easy or already visible (everyday objects, advertising, etc.) – they appropriate the work of others or use assistants or the public to execute their ideas. Others use high-tech techniques that permit the creation of stunning visual effects that could not have existed in the days before computers and digital manipulation. The age-old questions about the relationship between the artwork and external reality (if they even concede its existence) continue to be asked but in new ways.

Contemporary artists use contemporary media. Instead of painting a canvas, framing it and hanging it on a wall, or shaping a sculpture from stone, bronze or clay, many of them create performances and installations that live temporary lives; after the happening happens, it exists only in various forms of documentation: videos and photographs, preparatory sketches and props. They create artworks that reshape the environment or change with time. They make artworks about their own artworks or the artworks of others. They blur boundaries between trash and art, art and commerce, lowbrow and highbrow, painting and sculpture, word and picture, sight and sound, performance and exhibit. (Is this photograph art or is it a photograph of art?) They take a tradition and add something that doesn’t belong, or subtract something that does. They break the rules or they draw your attention to the rules they are following. While some contemporary artists may only want you to come away from their work thinking “What pretty art” or “Wow is he talented!”, it is more likely that they want to send you away from an encounter with their art filled with questions: ‘Why this?”, “What for?” and perhaps, ultimately, “Why not?”

All this is prelude for my latest meta-list: Best Contemporary Visual Artists – the Critics’ Picks. To make the list, I collected a number of lists of the best contemporary artists (mostly still living, but a few who have recently passed) and arranged them with the most-listed artists at the top. Then, for each artist, I compiled their most highly-regarded works of art. These range from relatively traditional paintings and sculptures to a man with gold paint on his face explaining artworks to a dead rabbit, a shark floating in formaldehyde, a room full of light, pictures cut out of biker magazines, a portrait created from thousands of magazine pictures, instructions for painting a wall and many more. I hope you enjoy the list and use it to explore the world of contemporary art.

Favorite Movies Seen in 2014*

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The following is a list of movies I saw for the first time in 2014 that I rated 4.5 or 5.0 stars out of 5. The list includes movies that were made in 2014 and before, and also includes a couple of 2014 movies that I saw in January 2015 (hence the asterisk above). The idea of reducing one’s opinion about a movie to a single 1-5 rating has always seemed a bit ridiculous to me – there are so many facets to filmmaking that I sometimes wish we could rate each facet separately: the writing, cinematography, editing, sound, soundtrack, acting, etc. (Or just discuss them without ratings – there’s an idea.) But I do find it useful to rate the movies, if only for occasions like this list.

5 Stars
Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
Transcendent – Linklater and his actors have the power to create moments of true life that are evocative without being melodramatic; it is as much a story about parenting as growing up.
Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
An unevenness almost brought it down to a 4.5, but the chase sequence is the best I’ve ever seen, and the surreal section in which Buster steps into the movie screen is a timeless work of genius.

4.5 Stars
Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
Joanna Newsom reading Thomas Pynchon as a manic pixie voice over; Omar in a cameo; Josh Brolin gruff but lovable; Owen Wilson, wacky but lovable; Katherine Waterston deceptive but lovable; and over them all is Joaquin’s Doc in a haze of pot smoke continuing to prove that he is the best of his generation (not just Her and The Master, go back to Gladiator, and Inventing the Abbotts and especially To Die For)
Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)
Remember Topsy-Turvy? This is that history-buff Mike Leigh, not the contemporary working class dramedy director of Secrets & Lies (OK, they’re the same person). Timothy Spall gives the performance of a lifetime, but just as important are the women in his life – each of whom is etched in acid. Thankfully, Leigh never tells you who to vote for.
The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
Like Fellini before him, Sorrentino is not afraid to let you know there is a real person behind the camera as well as in front of it; he has a photographer’s eye for great shots; the aging central character has many loves, not the least Rome and himself.
Ida (Pawel Pawlikowksi, 2013)
In early 1960s Poland, a young novitiate has a chance to explore the secular world before taking her vows – she goes on the road with an aunt and a journey of self-discovery, through the gray snowy towns and forests. The tone is never sentimental or cliche – but there are secrets and surprises.
Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013)
Alright alright alright! This has been an amazing run for Matthew McConaughey – I’ve seen this, Mud, The Paperboy, and Bernie in the past couple of years and he is stellar in every one. Once again, the writing, direction and acting manage to take a potentially maudlin, sticky-sentimental tale and keep it real.
Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)
Almost every Coen brothers movie is a bit of a disappointment to me, because they are usually very close to perfect, but just miss the mark somewhere. Still, they are so good that a near miss still rates a 4.5 from me. Is Goodman right on the money or way over the top? What does the cat symbolize? (It symbolizes his pet.) Are the songs his voiceover?
Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)
Spike Jonze likes to start with an out-there concept (his own or Charlie Kaufman’s), but it doesn’t work without real human emotion. The conceit here is that the ‘real’ relationship is with a machine, a kinder, gentler HAL 9000 who sounds just like Scarlet Johansson.
Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013)
The third part of the trilogy that might be called Boyhood: The Prologue. Every 10 years or so, we check in with a couple we met on a train so long ago. This one is about marriage and so there is of course, a big fight. And a reconciliation?
The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2011)
A heartbreaking unpredictable tale of an abandoned boy and the woman who tries to make a home for him.
Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)
Werner Herzog doesn’t get the death penalty. And he is not afraid to voice his criticisms in his Werner Herzogian way while interviewing two boys who committed a random murder, one of whom is on death row.
Crazy Love (Dan Klores & Fisher Stevens, 2007)
A typical American love story, except for the part about hiring someone to throw acid in your girlfriend’s face.
Caché (Hidden) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Hitchcockian suspense tale about a family that is being watched, but they don’t know why. Keeps you thinking right until the very last frame.
Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)
Just young people doing what they do, except for the raping maybe. The Thing that Wouldn’t Leave.
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
Casting Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe was like casting Woody Allen as Superman – and Robert Altman knew exactly what he was doing. Altman’s 70’s rethinking of the detective flick involves self-indulgence, ennui and worshipping lots of false idols. Oh – and Marlowe’s cat is missing (what does that symbolize?).
A Woman Is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)
Take Belmondo and Seberg’s conversations from Breathless and convert them into a parody of sit-com dialogue and you’ll get an idea of this light-hearted experiment from Godard.
Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)
Wheat, wheat, fields of wheat. And a tractor. Change comes to the Ukraine.
Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929)
American actress Louise Brooks made her best movie in Germany. It’s a morality tale about a good-time girl who gets her comeuppance, but it’s the fun times we remember.
Safety Last (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1923)
The famous climb up the side of the building is the highlight, but there are lots of gags before and after, and even a fair amount of character development.

The Best of 2014: Your Meta-Lists Have Arrived

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When historians look back on 2014, they will probably remember it for one event: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and annexation of the Crimea. Putin’s action hearkened back to a long line of precedent of unilateral annexation by such power-mongers and empire builders as Cyrus the Great of Persia, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Tughril Beg, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and so many more. But for those who follow pop culture, the highlights of the year involved names like: FKA Twigs, Taylor Swift, Perfume Genius, Flying Lotus, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Anthony Doerr, Leslie Jamison and Marilynne Robinson.

Here are the meta-lists of the best movies, music and books of 2014, as determined by a critical consensus.

Best Films of 2014
Best Books of 2014
Best Music of 2014

They Blinded Us with Science

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“So little time – so much to know!” – Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D.

I’ve been taking a break from blogging about the arts to spend some time with the sciences. I’ve immersed myself in discoveries, inventions, explorations, and observations. I’ve been learning (or relearning) about black holes, internal combustion engines, photosynthesis, neurotransmitters, planes, trains and automobiles, the Krebs cycle, the ozone layer, dinosaurs, gravitation, the periodic table, inertia, entropy, psychoanalysis, safety pins, parachutes, plate tectonics, washing machines, sewing machines, evolution, radio waves, the speed of light, hydrothermal vents, animal domestication, genetic modification and The Pill. I watched the rise and fall of catastrophism, vitalism, phlogiston, luminiferous aether, spontaneous generation, the oar-powered submarine and the steam-powered automobile. For those easily intimidated by science, I promise you that lying just beneath all the names and dates, technical terms and and chemical and mathematical formulas, are lots of fascinating stories and unforgettable characters. I even sneaked in a couple of jokes here and there – extra points for those who find them.

Here are my four new science lists:

Most Important Scientific Discoveries of All Time
This meta-list contains all the discoveries and inventions on three or more of the 17+ lists I found. They are organized by rank, with the most-listed discoveries on top. Accompanying each discovery is an illustration of some kind and a short essay about the topic.

Most Important Scientific Discoveries – Chronological
Similar to the first list, but this one is organized chronologically, so you can get a better sense of the history of science, and it includes all the discoveries/inventions that were on two or more of the 17+ original source lists. Because this list was so long, I decided not to add illustrations, although I may change my mind on this.

The Greatest Scientists of All Time
If you’ve been following along, you know how this works. I found lots of ‘greatest scientists of all time’ lists and combined them into a meta-list. This list is organized by rank, meaning that the scientists on the most lists are at the top. For each scientist, I’ve included a short description of his or her achievements, as well as birth and death dates, country of origin and a picture.

Timeline of Science and Technology
If you’re short on time and want an overview of scientific knowledge, this is the list for you. I combined the Scientific Discoveries, Greatest Scientists and Best Inventions lists, mixed in some of the Art and Architecture lists, and then threw in some random information (worst floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; milestones of human evolution; the formation of the universe, our solar system, etc.). The result is a somewhat eclectic selection of events that have occurred over the last 13.8 billion years, with emphasis on the last 400 years or so. Each entry is only a sentence long, so this one is perfect for those with short attention spans. And there are pictures.

I hope you’ll take a look. And feel free to leave a comment.

Don’t Adjust Your Set – Introducing the Best TV Shows List

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Television in the English-speaking world has always been a medium with a chip on its shoulder and something to prove. It’s been called the ‘boob tube’ and the ‘idiot box’, and social scientists remind us regularly how much time we spend watching it, while social critics condemn us for watching too much. As early as 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow called television a “vast wasteland”, although, in a less often quoted line from the same speech, he added, “When television is good, nothing … is better.”

Despite occasional sporadically-enforced bans on television on ‘school nights’, I managed to watch an enormous amount of television while growing up in the ’60s and ’70s. While I have curbed my TV appetite significantly in recent years, during my adulthood I have sat on a couch staring at a screen for more hours than I can count. My tastes as a small child ran to cartoons (Tom & Jerry, Caspar, Roadrunner & Coyote, Bugs Bunny), the Little Rascals and Saturday morning live action shows (Banana Splits, H.R. Pufnstuf, anyone?) By the time Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street came along in 1968, I was moving on to live TV series – Batman, Get Smart, Time Tunnel, Gomer Pyle – and movies. My father and I had a ritual of going through the TV Guide every week so he could pick out great movies for me to watch. Back then, the local stations and PBS played lots of old feature films – horror and science fiction particularly, but it could be anything from The Gold Rush to The Searchers to Gidget Goes Hawaiian. (And of course the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. I’ll never forget the shock I got when my parents bought a color TV and I found out that Kansas was in black and white, but Oz was in dazzling Technicolor.) The local stations also played reruns of cancelled series from the ‘50s and ‘60s, giving me the chance to see I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Twilight Zone and The Burns and Allen Show. (Only later as an adult did I discover the joys of Your Show of Shows and the warped genius of Ernie Kovacs.) Of course, television brought a lot more into the house than dramas and sit-coms, kids’ shows, and old movies. Between 1968 and 1974, I watched battlefield coverage of the Vietnam War on the evening news, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the Miracle Mets winning the World Series, Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon, the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky chess match, the terrifying Munich Olympics, the Watergate hearings, and Nixon’s resignation – all live on TV.

While I always had my favorite shows, the omnipresence of programming, even before the explosion of channels with cable, meant that sometimes I settled for less – and there was plenty of it. For every M*A*S*H, there was more than one One Day at a Time (ahh, Valerie Bertinelli…). For every Columbo, there was a Charlie’s Angels. By the mid-1970s, we had imported some British television (Monty Python, Masterpiece Theater) and raised sketch comedy to another level with Saturday Night Live. But by the late ‘70s, American TV seemed to be in a slump that was only relieved somewhat by innovative series like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere in the early 1980s. But a renaissance was coming, and it was heralded by two events: the rise of paid cable, particularly HBO, and Rupert Murdoch’s 1986 launching of Fox Television to challenge the big three TV networks.

In 1987, Fox premiered two landmark comedies: Married … with Children and The Tracey Ullmann Show (the latter included a Matt Groening cartoon feature that in 1989 would become The Simpsons.) While they may seem tame now, these irreverent, push-the-envelope series and those that followed on Fox in the early 1990s (Beverly Hills 90210, Get a Life, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, Melrose Place, The Ben Stiller Show, The X-Files, Party of Five, MadTV) shook up the rest of television and injected new life and creativity into the medium, leading to a sustained upsurge that may not have peaked yet. When HBO abandoned its original purpose of showing theatrically-released movies and began producing consistently excellent original series in the late 1980s, the bar was raised even higher, as the major networks and even smaller cable channels like AMC, A&E, FX, TNT and TBS rose to the challenge set by The Larry Sanders Show, Oz, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Band of Brothers, The Wire, Deadwood, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. We’re at a point now when serious critics will occasionally announce that the writing for the best television shows is better than that found in Hollywood’s latest releases. I don’t feel qualified to agree or disagree, but I do think that Mr. Minow may have been right: if you were forced to watch a few hours from every one of the hundreds of available channels on your television (not to mention streaming content on Hulu, Netflix, etc.), you might decide that television is still a vast wasteland. But if you choose carefully, and select the best that TV can offer, it would not surprise me if you concluded that the quality and entertainment value available is as good as anything else out there, if not better.

The above is just a prelude to my meta-list of the Best TV Shows of All Time, based on a compilation of numerous lists by critics, writers and experts (click on link below). Disagree with the top vote-getter? Don’t have a cow, man.

BEST TV SHOWS OF ALL TIME – THE CRITICS’ PICKS

Mistitled Masterpieces

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While doing research for my visual arts lists, I occasionally came across works of art whose titles were misleading, inaccurate or just plain wrong, but for various reasons are still used to refer to the painting or sculpture they imperfectly describe. I thought it might be interesting to make a list of such works with an explanation of the mismatch between the title and the object to which it is attached. Here it is, in chronological order (with illustrations, of course). I’d be interested if folks have other examples to share.

1. Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel (Unknown artist, c. 38,000 BCE)

In German, the name means Lion-Human, with no gender reference, but the English translation implies that the figure is a male, even though at least some scientists believe it represents a female.

2a. Venus of Willendorf (Unknown artist, c. 28,000-25,000 BCE)

2b. Venus of Laussel (Unknown artist, c. 23,000 BCE)

2c. Venus of Brassempouy (Unknown artist, c. 24,000-22,000 BCE)

2d. Venus of Kostenki (Unknown artist, c. 23,000-21,000 BCE)

Despite their names, these prehistoric figurines do not depict the Roman goddess Venus, whose mythology was not created until many thousands of years later. The anachronistic term “Venus of _____” arose from a belief that these and similar figurines represent fertility goddesses and as such were prehistoric analogues to Venus, the goddess of love. Because the term is misleading and has caused confusion, its use by archaeologists is on the wane.

3. Ram in a Thicket (Unknown artist, c. 2600-2400 BCE)

Most experts believe the figures represented by this pair of figurines are goats, but the discovering archaeologist named them after a story in the Book of Genesis in which Abraham sees a ram caught in a thicket.

4. Standard of Ur (Unknown artist, c. 2600-2400 BCE)

This mosaic-inlaid box may have been part of a musical instrument, but there is no evidence to support the original discoverer’s theory that it is a standard, or flag-like sign that would have been carried into battle.

5. Mask of Agamemnon (Unknown artist, c. 1550-1500 BCE)

Despite the hopes of its discoverer, Heinrich Schliemann, this gold mask is 300 years too old to be associated with the Trojan War and its participants, including Agamemnon. To make matters worse, some believe Schliemann may have faked the mask, which is much more sophisticated than other masks found at the same site.

6. Ludovisi Throne (Unknown artist, c. 470-460 BCE)

The Ludovisi Throne is not a throne. It was probably part of the foundation of an Ancient Greek temple.

7. Venus de Milo (Alexandros of Antioch, 130-100 BCE)

It may be splitting hairs, but the statue known as Venus de Milo was made by Hellenist Greeks and found on a Greek island, so the goddess would have been called Aphrodite, not Venus, who was Aphrodite’s counterpart in Roman mythology.

8. Battersea Shield (Unknown artist, c. 350-50 BCE)

It may look like a shield, but experts say the Battersea Shield was not battle-worthy or battle-tested and was probably a replica used for ceremonial purposes and as a votive offering.

9. The Bayeux Tapestry (Unknown artist, c. 1075)

The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry. A tapestry is a woven textile, while the Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth, in which the artist used wool thread to embroider designs on a linen cloth.

10. The Well of Moses (Claus Sluter, 1395-1405)

The Well of Moses is not a well. It is the base of a Crucifixion scene, the upper portion of which was dismantled during the French Revolution by anti-clerical mobs.

11. The Holy Trinity Icon (Andrei Rublev, 1408-1425)

Not so much a mistitling, as a title that requires a leap of logic. The figures represented in the famous icon are the three angels who appeared to Abraham at Mamre, according to the Book of Genesis. A theological metaphor connects the three angels to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of the Christian trinity.

12. Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (Jan van Eyck, 1433)

The subject of this possible self-portrait is not wearing a turban. He is wearing a fashionable 15^th Century head-covering known as a chaperon. The turban-like appearance is the result of the subject’s decision to take the long tails of the chaperon and wrap them around his head, possibly to avoid having them interfere with his painting.

13. Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (The Arnolfini Portrait) (Jan van Eyck, 1434)

For centuries, scholars believed they had correctly identified the subjects of this portrait as the Arnolfinis, but in 1997, it was discovered that Arnolfini was married six years after Jan van Eyck’s death. Was Arnolfini married twice? Does the painting show Giovanni Arnolfini blessing another family member (a niece?) on her marriage? Or are there no Arnolfinis involved in the portrait at all? Art historians have not reached consensus on answers to these questions.

14. St. Francis in the Desert (Giovanni Bellini, c. 1480)

While the area in St. Francis’s immediate vicinity is rocky and somewhat barren, the landscape beyond is anything but desert-like. In fact, it looks like an Italian countryside. ‘Going into the desert’ may have been shorthand for any religious figure going on a solitary retreat away from civilization, in remembrance of Jesus’s temptation in the desert.

15. John the Baptist in the Wilderness (Geertgen tot Sint Jans, c. 1485-1490)
The ‘wilderness’ looks more like a well-groomed park, and it is within sight of a town.

16. An Old Man and His Grandson (Domenic Ghirlandaio, 1490)

While the ages and the behaviors of the subjects make it perfectly reasonable to infer that their relationship is grandfather and grandson, there is no direct evidence of the names of the subjects or their relationship.

17. The Three Philosophers (Giorgione, 1506-1509)

The current name came from a 1525 catalogue of the owner’s artworks, but no one really knows who the three individuals are or who they are supposed to represent, although there are plenty of theories.

18. The Laughing Cavalier (Frans Hals, 1624)

Wrong on both counts. First, there is no evidence the subject was a cavalier. Second, while the man is smiling, he is definitely not laughing.

19. The Night Watch (Rembrandt, 1642)

First, the militia in the painting is not on a watch, which only occurs in times of danger, it is marching out of headquarters. Second, even though Rembrandt’s glazes have darkened over the centuries, the scene occurs during the day.

20. The Milkmaid (Johannes Vermeer, 1657-1658)

A milkmaid milks cows. This woman is a domestic kitchen maid, not a milkmaid, even though she happens to be pouring milk.

20. The Jewish Bride (Rembrandt, 1667)

There is no evidence about the identity of the subjects of this double portrait or their religious affiliations. Some scholars do believe the subject of the painting is the Old Testament’s Isaac and Rebekah. Others believe that it shows a contemporary couple dressed as the Biblical pair, following a common tradition of having one’s portrait done as a character from history.

21. The Embarkation for Cythera (Antoine Watteau, 1717)

Although the various titles for this and a very similar piece indicate that the couples are on their way to the island of Cythera, some experts believe the painting actually shows couples returning from Cythera.

22. Chirk Aqueduct (Crambe Beck Bridge) (John Sell Cotman, 1804-1807)

For many years, scholars assigned the name Chirk Aqueduct to this landscape painting of Cotman’s. A recent reexamination of the painting and its subject have led to the conclusion that the structure depicted is Crambe Beck Bridge, in the north of England, not Chirk Aqueduct in Wales.

23. Woman with a Pearl (Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1868-1870)

Most of the mistaken titles on this list were assigned by someone other than the artist. In this case, the artist gave an incorrect title to his own painting. The woman in Corot’s Woman with a Pearl is not wearing a pearl. The decoration on her forehead is a leaf. Scholars suspect that Corot chose his title as an homage to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Woman with a Pearl Necklace.

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