In 1993, two artists set out to discover what America's favourite painting would look like. They hired telephone researchers to call 1,001 Americans of all demographic hues and ask them a list of questions.
What sort of paintings do you like? Realistic or imaginary? Landscape or portrait? Outdoors or indoors? What people would you like to see depicted? Famous or ordinary? Men, women or chil- dren? Working, posing or at lei- sure? Clothed or nude? Wild or domestic animals? Which colours do you prefer? Expressive brush strokes or a smooth sur- face? How big would your ideal painting be? Should it have a message or be decorative? A reli- gious or non-religious theme?
There were 102 questions in all. Once equipped with the data, the artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, set to work to create two paintings - America's Most Wanted, and America's Most Unwanted. For the Most Wanted picture, they tried to produce a painting that most closely fitted the respondents' preferences. Eighty-eight per cent of respondents wanted a landscape, so that is what Komar and Melamid gave them. Favourite colours were blue (first) and green (second), so these featured prominently. Sixty-seven per cent wanted the picture to be the size of a dishwasher. The result is a preposterous composite painting-by-numbers based on a cross-statistical analysis of aesthetic preferences. A bewigged George Washington stands against a soothing blue lakescape, along with a couple of dear deer and a leisurely (fullyclothed) threesome. It's undeniably restful, but also a compositional mess. "What is striking about America's Most Wanted is that I cannot imagine anyone really enjoying it as a painting, least of all anyone in the population whose taste it is supposed to reflect," argued the philosopher and art critic Arthur C Danto in a recent essay. "No one who wants a painting of wild animals or a painting of George Washington wants a picture of George Washington and of wild animals. Conjunction can be displeasing even if the conjuncts are pleasing." After the painting was made, and an image of it posted on the Internet along with the poll results, the pair held a series of public forums to encourage discussion about the project. At one, a woman said she would have preferred to see a couple of nude men in their thirties serving drinks to two clothed women reclining on a picnic blanket (who wouldn't?). Bob, a vet, wanted this: "Yankee Stadium, night, 30,000 fans there - Mickey Mantle at bat." Maya, a first-grader, wanted: "A painting of me and Diana playing on the big field with flowers, the sun, grass and a couple of trees." There's just no pleasing some people. America's Most Unwanted, by contrast, was "different looking" (only 30 per cent wanted that), featured gold, orange, peach and teal (colours which each only polled 1 per cent of the vote in the colour preferences category), had unpopular geometric patterns and colour patches that did not blend into one another. But this was only the start of the artists' scientific guide to taste. Komar and Melamid then did similar surveys for nine other countries. Disturbingly, many of the respondents in these countries wanted landscapes similar to that chosen by Americans. Kenyans, for instance, wanted a landscape with a lake, but with Kilimanjaro in the background, no George Washington and a hippopotamus rather than deer.
The Chinese wanted something similar, too, but as big as a wall. Icelanders wanted a landscape, sure, but rather less placid than that favoured by Danes. Turks chose white as their second favourite colour and wanted children, lots of them, gambolling in the foreground. One could acknowledge perhaps the remarkable convergence in the Most Wanted paintings: after all, blue is the colour of relaxation and what most people want is to look through the window of the canvas on a soothing scene. What was just as interesting, though, were the differences. Holland alone plumped for an abstract painting as its Most Wanted. China's respondents found it difficult to express strong preferences about any of the questions. The surveys also found suggestive data within countries. Blue, for example, the US's most popular colour (44 per cent) appealed most to people in the central states aged between 40 and 49, conservative, white, male, making $30-40,000 and who never went to museums at all. Those who most favoured a serious mood in their paintings were childless, Southern, black conservatives. Komar and Melamid's project has driven some in the New York art world potty. Click on to the relevant Web page and, amid some praise, you will find lots of messages to the artists angrily condemning them for introducing the notion of "the people" to aesthetic evaluation.
There are also memos from former market researchers attacking the basis of the survey and contending that pollsters only create rather than reflect opinion. There are pieces of email from others accusing them of echoing Nazi aesthetics and attempting to obliterate "degenerate art". You have to feel for these people, since they don't really get what Komar and Melamid are up to. The pair are canny conceptual artists, who have been wittily and yet seriously exploring fundamental aesthetic issues - What is beauty? Who says? Where do we (artists) come from? What are we? Where are we going? - since they emigrated from the former Soviet Union in 1978, and no doubt before that. During much of the Eighties, Komar and Melamid drolly satirised the Socialist Realist art of their homeland. But they also, lovingly, parodied American art. They had been dissident artists in the Soviet Union, but were no less so in America. They collaborated with an elephant called Renee on a canvas consisting of two cataclysms of coloured squiggles separated by a white void in the middle. "Abstract expressionism wasn't invented by animals," said Komar, "but Renee is better at it than we are." Keen observers would have spotted the elephant footprint signature at the bottom. Their new book, incorporating the results of the Most Wanted surveys and the resultant pictures, is called Painting By Num- bers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide To Art. According to Luc Sante, reviewing the book for the New York Times earlier this month, the project is "a little bomb thrown into the works", exposing, among other things, the fact that "vanguard" art in the US "is always engaged in a dance with the tastes of those who can afford to buy it", and that popular taste is treated with contempt by that vanguard, however radical it purports to be. Far from endorsing the market determination of artistic value, Komar and Melamid laugh at the possibility of determining an index of taste. And yet they aren't just laughing. They are truly baffled about what determines aesthetic quality. Melamid said: "I heard once Mary Boone [a New York gallery owner] at some seminar say she chooses art because of the quality - and when she sees really good art she makes her decision. I don't believe this. What is quality, how should we define this quality?"
The Most Wanted project throws down the gauntlet to the art establishment to come up with a criterion of taste better than their own, deeply-flawed, market research-generated results. Their complex piece of conceptual art began when they decided to use that most faux democratic of scientific tools - the opinion poll - to create art, it includes the data and the paintings, the focus groups and public forums, and hasn't ended yet.
After all, the resultant critical furore is part of the project and so is this article. And so, in so far as you have read it, are you.
Painting By Numbers: Komar And Melamid's Scientific Guide To Art is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($50). Their Web site is at: http:// www.diacenter.org/km/ index.html
Painting by numbers: "America's Most Wanted", the composite painting which has caused such a stir