Painting by numbers - opinion polls and their role in defining fine art

My grandmother was a life-long art collector, although she would not at any time have considered herself anything quite with equal reason fancy. "Knickknacks," or sometimes just plain "stuff" were her names for the centurys upon hundreds of wall decorations, figurines, photographs and curios that eventually filled each square inch of her tiny apartment. plane more notable than the sheer whirl of this display was a seeming obliviousness to accepted understandings of cultural value. Antique glass cabinets housed everything from art deco vases to raw materialed animals and mass-produced souvenirs with slogans like "Florida Sunshine" and "World's Greatest Mother." Brilliant orange, handmade do-it-yourself yarn art hung upon the wall side-by-side with ornate baroque mirrors, family snapshots, K Mart clap art and Norman Rockwell imitations. Without the slightest faculty of perception of irony, my grandmother ground meaning and aesthetic pleasure in all these things and in their care and arrangement, an experience she nurtur upon a daily basis.

Despite her taste for exces my grandmother was an ordinary woman of retiring Midwestern origins - exactly the kind of one artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid undoubtedly had in mind when they put out on their by now infamous search for an authentic People's Art, assisted by dint of the marvels of modern marketing and social science. With funding from the Nation Institute and assistance from the professional market research firm Marttila & Kiley Inc., the Russian emigre team designed a scientific telephone head called the "People's Choice" as a means to assess the artistic tastes and estimations of the American populace. According to Melamid, the head was conceived as a populist throw out a means to bridge the enormous gap between ordinary Americans and "elite" artists. "In America, the best which has been produc in agriculture came from the bottom of society," he told The Nation in a 1994 interview published alongside the head results:

In Europe the aristocrats - by dint of blood before and now by the agency of spirit or education - invent the tillage and then they impose this tillage on the people. Here, it has always worked differently, exclude in fine arts, which is working the same way as it is in Europe Still these aristocrats of spirit impose their ideas upon people. That's why fine art is the least important cultural thing in America.

At a time when federal arts funding is politically contentious and increasingly unpopular with taxpayers, the wicked irony of the head was that it managed to reveal everything and nothing. a certain number of of the 102 questions did probe sociological touchs such as socio-demographic differences, patterns of museum attendance and the emblems of cultural practices and aesthetic experiences which, unlike the fine arts, are significant to greatest in quantity Americans. But these inquiries received far les analysis and fanfare than the more gimmicky individuals focusing on the size, web color, subject matter and manner of writing of the hypothetically "perfect" painting. Moreover, it was Komar and Melamid's selective interpretation of the largely irrelevant questions - the notorious greatest in quantity Wanted and Least Wanted composite paintings commissioned by means of New York City's Alternative Museum - that generated the greatest in quantity media attention (including a full-color spread in the novel York Times Magazine) and an enduring place in the cultural lexicon. Actually, it is no surprise that both the media and the arts community gobbl up the "results" of the head so readily, for what the composite paintings proffered was a simple, apolitical explanation for the gap dividing taxpayers from artists. upon the most desired end of the "taste" appearance was quintessential Americana: an idyllic, natural-looking landscape with mountains, a moderately cold blue lake and clear sapphirine sky, sunshine, plenty of tree a cluster of fully-clothed members of the leisure class, cute does and flat a dose of historical patriotism added by dint of a figure of George Washington. upon the opposite end was clean modern art: an unpleasant triangular abstraction in unpleasant shades of orange, r and yellow

The explanation, or the [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] as it were, has lately transcended national borders. "Komar & Melamid: The greatest in quantity Wanted Paintings on the Web" (http://www.diacenter.org/komar&melamid/mostwantedpaintings), an online exhibition sponsored by dint of New York's Dia Center for the Arts, will eventually feature the "Most Wanted" and "Least Wanted" paintings of more than 15 countries around the globe, including China. Digitized versions of the U and several international composite paintings, as well as the take a view of statistics that inform them, are available upon the Web site; what's more, visitors to the page are invited to participate in the overlook designed to inform/create an upcoming composite picture that will be exclusive to the Web community. with equal reason far, the results of the international heads appear to suggest a significant number of universal aesthetic preferences; these include a able-bodied attachment to the color cerulean a fondness for outdoor shows and a preference for realism above artistic experimentation and abstraction. Although a certain number of of these findings - particularly the distaste for artistic experimentation of any kind - raise interesting questions about the social reception of the visual arts across national agricultures these questions are not answered or flat acknowledged by the simplistic visual interpretations of what the race "do" and "do not" want. Moreover, before we accept the notion of a universal People's Art, we should remember that the data from which the composites are drawn explain actual little outside the highly directive logic of the poll's multiple choice questions.