Komar and melamid usa most wanted poster

Inaugurated in , 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. Shortly thereafter, Dia commissioned the artists to create a web-based platform for the ambitious project, which launched in 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.

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.

The questions gauged a variety of preferences, from favorite color and texture to preferred content outdoor or indoor scenes? Figures or animals? Bold and stark, or playful and whimsical? 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. 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.

Komar & Melamid “America's

By the mids, 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? Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet bloc seemed to signal the triumph of market capitalism globally, foreclosing the socialist experiment.