This Art And Music Quiz Is Harder Than It Looks — Can You Ace It?

Some knowledge feels like it should simply be in the water supply: the painter of the Mona Lisa, the city that gave us the Beatles, the number of keys on a piano. And yet put ten of these “everybody knows that” questions in a row — five from the gallery, five from the concert hall — and something interesting happens. This quiz mixes famous art and famous music into one test of cultural memory, the same spirit as our middle school quiz most adults can’t pass, but for grown-up tastes. No searching, no phoning a museum-going friend. Keep your score, then face the answer key.

The Art Round

Question 1: Who painted The Starry Night, the swirling night sky of 1889?

1. Claude Monet
2. Vincent van Gogh
3. Pablo Picasso
4. Salvador Dalí

Question 2: The Mona Lisa hangs in which museum?

1. The British Museum, London
2. The Uffizi, Florence
3. The Louvre, Paris
4. The Prado, Madrid

Question 3: Which pop artist became famous for paintings of Campbell’s soup cans?

1. Roy Lichtenstein
2. Andy Warhol
3. Jackson Pollock
4. Keith Haring

Question 4: Michelangelo spent four years painting the ceiling of which chapel?

1. St Peter’s Basilica
2. The Sistine Chapel
3. The Duomo
4. Westminster Abbey

Question 5: Girl with a Pearl Earring was painted by which Dutch master?

1. Rembrandt
2. Johannes Vermeer
3. Frans Hals
4. Pieter Bruegel

The Music Round

Question 6: How many symphonies did Beethoven compose?

1. Five
2. Seven
3. Nine
4. Twelve

Question 7: How many keys does a standard piano have?

1. 76
2. 84
3. 88
4. 96

Question 8: The Beatles formed in which English city?

1. London
2. Manchester
3. Liverpool
4. Birmingham

Question 9: What is it called when a group sings entirely without instruments?

1. Acoustic
2. A cappella
3. Unplugged
4. Falsetto

Question 10: How many strings does a standard guitar have?

1. Four
2. Five
3. Six
4. Seven

The Answer Key

1. B — Vincent van Gogh, painted from the window of an asylum at Saint-Rémy in 1889; it now lives at MoMA in New York. 2. C — The Louvre, behind bulletproof glass, smiling at roughly ten million visitors a year. 3. B — Andy Warhol, whose 32 soup cans of 1962 turned supermarket shelves into art history. 4. B — The Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, painted largely standing, whatever the lying-on-his-back legend says. 5. B — Johannes Vermeer; the painting is nicknamed the “Mona Lisa of the North”. 6. C — Nine, the Ninth giving us the Ode to Joy. 7. C — 88: 52 white notes and 36 black. 8. C — Liverpool, where a band formed in 1960 changed the economics of being young. 9. B — A cappella, Italian for “in the manner of the chapel”. 10. C — Six, tuned E-A-D-G-B-E.

Your Verdict

10/10: Gallery legend. Docents nod at you; playlist-makers fear you. 8–9: Genuinely cultured. You would survive any museum-and-concert double date. 5–7: Casual fan. You enjoy both worlds — you just enjoy them at a slight factual distance, which is more than can be said for the vanished hitmakers in our list of singers who were everywhere, then disappeared. 0–4: Background music. Art and music have been the soundtrack rather than the subject — easily fixed, starting with the hidden machinery in our open secrets of the entertainment industry. However you scored, you now own ten facts that will win you at least one future argument in a gallery or a bar. Spend them wisely.