题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
江苏省南京市六校联合体20182019学年高二下学期英语期末考试试卷
Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture known as a classic, struggling to see why it is famous? If so, you've probably thought about the question a psychologist, James Cutting, asked himself: How does a work of art come to be considered great?
The direct answer is that some works of art are just great: of inner superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can't see they're superior, that's your problem. But some social scientists have been asking questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons(名作目录)are little more than old historical accidents.
Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological pattern known as the "mereexposure effect" played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch(直觉). Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings canonical, included in arthistory books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group liked the canonical ones best. Cuttings students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.
Cutting believes his experiment casts light on how canons are formed. He reproduced works of impressionism today bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. Their preferences given to certain works made them more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in collections. And the fame passed down the years. The more people were exposed to, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics added to their popularity. After all, it's not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. Critics' praise is deeply mixed with publicity. "Scholars", Cutting argues, "are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure."
The process described by Cutting show a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls "cumulative advantage": once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still. A few years ago, Watts had a similar experience to Cutting's in another Paris museum. After queuing to see the "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three other Leonardos, to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention?
When Watts looked into the history of "the greatest painting of all time", he discovered that, for most of its life, the "Mona Lisa" remained in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the "Mona Lisa" It was only in the 20th century that "Mona Lisa rocketed to the numberone spot. What brought it there wasn't a scholarly reevaluation, but a theft. In 1911 a worker at the Louvre walked out of the museum with the "Mona Lisa" hidden under his coat. Parisians were shocked at the theft of a painting to which, until then, they had paid little attention. When the museum reopened, people queued to see it. From then on, the "Mona Lisa "came to represent Western culture itself.
The intrinsic (本质的) quality of a work of art is starting to seem like its least important attribute. But perhaps it's more significant than our social scientists admit. Firstly, a work needs a certain quality to reach the top of the pile. The "Mona Lisa" may not be a worthy world champion but it was in the Louvre in the first place, and not by accident. Secondly, some objects are simply better than others. Read "Hamlet" after reading even the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and the difference may strike you as unarguable.
A study suggests that the exposure effect doesn't work the same way on everything, and points to a different conclusion about how canons are formed. Great art and mediocrity (平庸)can get confused, even by experts. But that's why we need to see, and read, as much as we can. The more were exposed to the good and the bad, the better we are at telling the difference.
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