From a friend who asked "Who's paying for THIS?", I just learned about a study which trained pigeons to be art critics:

Pigeons, it seems, can discriminate between art techniques and can even judge their quality.

According to scientists, given the incentive of food, racing pigeons can be trained to study the colour, pattern and texture of paintings and evaluate them like an art critic.

But as I read more closely it appeared that professional art critics were not involved:

Their experiment was divided into two halves: the first saw four pigeons placed in a chamber with a computer monitor displaying watercolour and pastel paintings by schoolchildren.

The paintings were divided into 'good' and 'bad' categories by 11 adults, including an art teacher, depending on whether the images were clear and precise.

The pigeons were shown some of the paintings from each category and rewarded with food when they pecked at the good pictures, but not the bad ones.

They were then presented with a mixture of new and old paintings from both categories and the researchers noted the birds consistently pecked at the 'good' paintings more often.

As the study proves, not all bird-brains are equal. A trained brain is better than an untrained brain.

By the way, an earlier study by the same psychologist found that pigeons can distinguish Monet from Picasso, as well as between impressionism and cubism:

psychologist Shigeru Watanabe and his colleagues at Keio University in Tokyo, describe how they trained pigeons to distinguish a Picasso from a Monet, and more generally, impressionism from cubism, by pecking the correct picture.

They trained the pigeons to distinguish between Monet and Picasso with 90 per cent accuracy. Once trained, the pigeons maintained their ability even for works they had never seen before. And when presented with paintings of other impressionists, such as Cézanne and Renoir, the birds lumped these in with Monet's portfolio but distinguished them from works by cubists such as Georges Braque.

Art critics might protest that these pigeons have not developed any aesthetic sensibility but have merely learnt to respond to simple cues, such as the sharp angles and bold colours of cubism compared with the fuzzy contours and pastel shades of the impressionists.

But Watanabe and his colleagues showed the pigeons remained accurate judges of style even when the images were blurred, or shown only in black and white. "We integrate several cues to recognise which is impressionist and which is cubist," he says. "The pigeons may do the same thing."

Indeed, the art critic's only remaining advantage is that they do not peck the paintings.

Again, the cleanup work is a job for the layers of editors and fact checkers.

MORE: While it wasn't easy, I just taught this pigeon to quote Disraeli!

Truly, art criticism is for the birds!