Artist Web Projects Spotlight: Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, The Most Wanted Paintings, 1995
Komar & Melamid, The Most Wanted Paintings (detail), 1995– . Collection of the artists, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for the Artist Web Projects series. © Komar & Melamid
By Kirsten Mairead Gill
Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Dia Art Foundation
In this series, we revisit works from Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects. Inaugurated in 1995, this series is the longest-running program of its kind in the United States, commissioning artists to create original projects for the internet. The full archive of projects is available here.
Russian emigrant artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid began The Most Wanted Paintings in 1994. Shortly thereafter, Dia commissioned the artists to create a web-based platform for the ambitious project, which launched in 1995. Hailing from a society with a dominant tradition of supposedly populist art in the form of Soviet Socialist Realism, Komar and Melamid were interested in determining, using the market-research tools of Western capitalist democracy, how a people’s art might look. The artist duo worked with marketing consulting firms to survey aesthetic preferences by nation, starting with the United States and expanding their research to over a dozen nations, from China to Kenya to Iceland. Based on the results, the artists created two series, Most Wanted Paintings and Least Wanted Paintings. For their contribution to Dia’s Artist Web Projects series, Komar and Melamid conducted an additional, internet-based survey, which asked over 3,000 participants to respond to a set of questions about their preferred aesthetics.
The artists envisioned the poll as a tool for traversing the borders between artistic and intellectual elites and non-specialists in those fields, and to access a truly populist opinion of art. Komar and Melamid see the survey—commonly used in the United States to determine majority political opinions and consumer tastes—as a mainstay of a capitalist democratic society. With the understanding that what makes art “good” or “bad” is usually determined by a small subset of the population—academics, artists, gallerists, and museum curators—the duo made sure to address their poll to a diverse sample of respondents. The questions gauged a variety of preferences, from favorite color and texture to preferred content (outdoor or indoor scenes? Figures or animals?) and style (modern or traditional? Bold and stark, or playful and whimsical?). A person may choose abstract and Modern art in one section, and also identify a preference for “fields and rural scenes” in the next. The eclectic feedback is then amalgamated into a single painting. The results are astonishingly consistent across the various nations polled: the people want landscapes in the 19th-century style, it seems, and they hate geometric abstraction. A few anomalies do occur: the Dutch alone favor abstraction, and the French prefer nudes over clothed figures.
Few artists’ projects gained more attention than The Most Wanted Paintings in the mid-1990s. In addition to the series of paintings and poll results from each country, the website also hosts an archive of letters received by Komar and Melamid in response to the project. These letters reveal a tendency to interpret the project as satirical, critical, or even cynical—an elaborate joke at the expense of “the people” (for example: “Dear K&M: I can’t help feel that you are buying into the very mentality that you intend to satirize”; and “it is only bullshit!”). However, these responses misunderstand the artists’ intentions, as they instead conceived the project as an attempt to prompt a new imaginary in art, in light of what Komar described as a crisis of ideas—in the art world, as well as in social thinking and politics. By the mid-1990s, postmodernism had taken hold of the art world, presenting two significant challenges for artists. First, past artistic criteria were destabilized, which made aesthetic hierarchies seem arbitrary—if anything could be art, which artistic choices are valid? Second, the artist’s position as the heroic figure at the avant-garde of society was challenged, and artists grappled with the question of what role, and what special knowledge, remained for them in postmodern society. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet bloc seemed to signal the triumph of market capitalism globally, foreclosing the socialist experiment. The Most Wanted Paintings responds to all of these developments: by outsourcing artistic choice to the people, who impose their own set of criteria; by repositioning the artist as a conduit for the voice of a broader community; and by asking what the people want during a period of epochal political change.
While Komar and Melamid’s hope for more varied, unexpected results was left unfulfilled, the banality of The Most Wanted Paintings hints at the limitations of the poll format: it fails to capture real desires, reshaping them to conform to a reduced set of terms. If a poll forces a choice between two unsatisfying options, what kind of imaginary could it really prompt? In this sense, The Most Wanted Paintings resonates with another work in Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects, Claude Closky’s 1997 Do you want love or lust? which leads users through an endless set of inane and bizarre quiz questions, yet yields no results.
Twenty-five years later, the surprise when a marginal group makes its voice heard may prompt us to ask if we need a people’s art more than ever.