Reading Comprehension — Passage 2
Questions 16–20 are based on the passage below.
When Impressionist paintings were first exhibited in Paris in 1874, the visible, unblended brushstrokes and everyday subject matter that now define the movement's appeal struck contemporary critics as evidence of technical incompetence rather than deliberate innovation; one hostile review, mocking the group's rejection of polished academic finish, gave the movement its now-celebrated name, originally intended as an insult. This pattern — innovation initially condemned as failure, later canonized as genius — recurs with striking regularity throughout art history, prompting some historians to argue that shock or discomfort in a contemporary audience may itself be an unreliable but historically consistent marker of genuine innovation, since truly novel work by definition violates the expectations trained into audiences by the art that preceded it. Other historians resist drawing too strong a lesson from this pattern, cautioning that for every once-ridiculed movement later vindicated by history, countless other genuinely mediocre works were also ridiculed in their own time and have, appropriately, remained forgotten; contemporary rejection, in other words, is a poor predictor of eventual merit precisely because it fails to distinguish between innovations later recognized as valuable and works that were simply unsuccessful in ways contemporary critics correctly identified. The retrospective narrative of misunderstood genius, these skeptics suggest, may say less about any general pattern than about which stories happen to be retold once the innovations in question are retroactively validated by later taste.