The Innocent Eye Test was an oil painting done by Mark Tansey in 1981 and is currently being exhibited at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York. In this painting, there is a cow standing and observing a picture of the other cows. While around a cow is a group of good looking men, they are all dressed in suits and wearing glasses. They are watching and recording the “real” cow’s reaction to revealing the “non-real” cows in painting. Why is it that the artist lets a cow observe the painting instead of humans? For me, the “real” cow represents the innocent eye out of the title The Innocent Eye Test. The innocent eye can be understood as the “fool’s sight”, in which vision can easily to be tricked by the authenticity of something “non-real”.
