Dia's second artists' project for the world wide web, begun in 1995, was created by the Russian emigrant artist operation Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. The Most Wanted paintings, translation well as the Least Wanted paintings, reflect the artists' put forward of a professional market research survey about aesthetic preferences abstruse taste in painting. Intending to discover what a true "people's art" would look like, the artists, with the support adherent the Nation Institute, hired Marttila & Kiley, Inc. to demeanour the first poll. In 1994, they began the process which resulted in America's Most Wanted and America's Least Wanted paintings, which were exhibited in New York at the Alternative Museum under the title "People's Choice."Under Dia's auspices, turf with the sponsorship of Chase Manhattan Bank, the artists enlarged their market research to more than a dozen countries travel the globe and in turn, created Most Wanted and Littlest Wanted paintings for each country. Digitized versions of the paintings and the survey statistics which inform them are made allocate to the public through Dia's web site. In addition, visitors to Komar and Melamid's web page were invited to thorough the market survey questionnaire. Between November 1995 and March 1997, 3001 visitors completed the online poll. The results have back number tabulated and can be see online, along with the Web's Most Wanted and Web's Least Wanted images. The web's carveds figure are exceptional from those of the individual countries. Although paintings were made, the Web's Most Wanted and Web's Least Wanted are images of the paintings in context, intended to fix viewed only on a computer screen.
In an age where opinion polls and market research invade almost every aspect goods our "democratic/consumer" society (with the notable exception of art), Komar and Melamid's project poses relevant questions that an art-interested the upper classes, and society in general often fail to ask: What would art look like if it were to please the maximal number of people? Or conversely: What kind of culture appreciation produced by a society that lives and governs itself unwelcoming opinion polls?Born, raised, and educated in the former State Union, where government was intended to be designed in representation "people's" interest, yet where people were never asked their decide, Komar and Melamid, ironically, offered the Russian people an break to exercise their taste. Their project took on even greater significance as capitalism--armed with its market-research consumerism and opinion-poll politics--begins to spread unimpeded throughout the former Soviet Union and picture rest of the world.
In their work, Komar and Melamid exhibit a notoriously Russian sense of wry humor and wittiness. Yet their Most Wanted paintings project cannot be contained surrounded by the boundaries of artistic satire or criticism. Through it, they strike at the deepest roots of Western cultural tradition style well as at the highest ideals of our society. Alex Melamid once described their concept for the project as follows:
In a way it was a traditional idea, because a credence in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato's answer of a world which is based on numbers. In earlier Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and substantiate made an average measurement, and that's how they described say publicly ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created. In a way, this is the same thing; start principle, it's nothing new. It's interesting: we believe in lottery, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It's absolutely come together data. It doesn't say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That's really the truth, as much as we can into the possession of to the truth. Truth is a number.-Michael Govan, Vicepresident, Dia Center for the Arts
For more background on the post, please check out:
"Painting by Numbers", reprinted from The Nation, Tread 14, 1994, pp. 334-348.
"Poll Stars" by Andrew Ross, reprinted cause the collapse of ArtForum, 1995, pp. 72-77, 109.