Here's an interesting exercise, with my answers.
1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Astaire - no contest.
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Gatsby.
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Ellington - no contest.
4. Cats or dogs? Cats, but dogs are also ace.
5. Matisse or Picasso? Picasso.
6. Yeats or Eliot? Can't split them.
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Chaplin.
8. Flannery O'Connor or John Updike? Pass.
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca, but it's close.
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Pollock.
11. The Who or the Stones? The Stones, no question.
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Philip Larkin.
13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens.
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Billie - no contest.
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky.
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? Pass.
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Pass. WotN says Balanchine.
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? I'm a vegetarian, but it used to be hamburgers.
19. Letterman or Leno? Not my area.
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Who?
21. Verdi or Wagner? Verdi.
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Kelly - more my type; but, oy, Monroe! What a terrible decision to have to make.
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Ditto; but Bill Monroe.
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Martin.
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Brando.
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Pass.
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt.
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Chopin.
29. Red wine or white? Red.
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Oscar Wilde.
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Grosse Pointe Blank.
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Indifferent.
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Baryshnikov, sort of.
34. Constable or Turner? WotN says Turner.
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Rio Bravo.
36. Comedy or tragedy? That's a rubbish choice. Both.
37. Fall or spring? Spring.
38. Manet or Monet? WotN says Monet.
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? The Sopranos.
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? The Gershwins.
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad.
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunrise.
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? What a question. You can say 'Cole Porter or x?' and it's Porter for any value of x.
44. Mac or PC? What do I know? PC.
45. New York or Los Angeles? New York - no contest.
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Pass.
47. Stax or Motown? Pass.
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh.
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Elvis Costello.
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? A blog, obviously. Magazines I read at the dentist.
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Olivier.
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin' Lovers? Ole Blue Eyes.
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Bonnie and Clyde, by a mile.
54. Ghost World or Election? Dunno either.
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism, if you must know.
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs Bunny.
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Guffaw. The former.
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Don't care.
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? You're asking me. Emmylou.
60. Johnson or Boswell? Pass.
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Jane Austen.
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Pass.
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Pass.
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Double Indemnity.
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Amadeus and Night at the Opera. I went to the opera once, in 1953, and it was once too many.
66. Blue or green? Blue.
67. A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It? Tied.
68. Ballet or opera? Ballet.
69. Film or live theater? Film.
70. Acoustic or electric? Acoustic.
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Vertigo - but both are in my top 10 movies of all time.
72. Sargent or Whistler? WotN: Whistler.
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Pass.
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Oklahoma.
75. Sushi, yes or no? No.
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Pass.
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Tennessee Williams.
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Pass.
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Pass.
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Lloyd Wright.
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Diana Krall.
82. Watercolor or pastel? Watercolour.
83. Bus or subway? Bus.
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Stravinsky.
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Crunchy.
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Dreiser.
87. Schubert or Mozart? Mozart, with Schubert coming a very good second.
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? 50s.
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Huck Finn.
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Pass.
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? That is tough. Pres for the cool, Coleman technically.
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Walt Whitman.
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Both.
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Who?
95. Italian or French cooking? Italian.
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? I refuse. Bach any how.
97. Anchovies, yes or no? Yes.
98. Short novels or long ones? Short.
99. Swing or bebop? Bebop.
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? The Last Waltz.
(Hat tip: Dominic Olivastro, and via Pejmanesque.)
