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THBVITALY KOMAR & ALEXANDER MELAMID (RUSSIAN B. 1943; B. 1945)
About Seller
566 East Boston Post Road
Mamaroneck, NY 10543
United States
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About Auction
LiveSep 17, 2016 - Sep 18, 2016
Shapiro Auctions info@shapiroauctions.com
View Full Catalog (396)
- Lot Description
VITALY KOMAR & ALEXANDER MELAMID (RUSSIAN B. 1943; B. 1945)
What is Your Favorite Color? (USA) from the "People`s Choice" Series, 1994
acrylic on canvas
122 x 152.5 cm (48 x 60 in.)
signed lower right; signed, titled, and dated on verso
ILLUSTRATED
Back cover image of JoAnn Wypijewski ed., Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid`s Scientific Guide to Art, ( New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997)
Luc Sante, "They Know What We Like", New York Times, January 4, 1998
LOT NOTES
In the winter of 1993, fifteen years after Komar and Melamid emigrated to the United States, and just as the Soviet Union was was dissolving, the duo set out to find out what it is that people really wanted to see depicted in paintings in a project called The People`s Choice.
Masters of irony, the artists used used one of the main tools of a capitalist society, the market research survey, to give voice to a statistically significant portion of the now ex-Soviet Union`s silent majority. The marketing team hired by Komar and Melamid thus interviewed over 1,000 people in the US, Russia, Ukraine, France, China, and each of the nine other counties forming the survey (plus several thousand more representing an international audience on the World Wide Web). Each participant was asked over one hundred questions in order to puzzle out the details of the country`s Most Wanted and Most Unwanted paintings.
The artists found significant cross-border similarities indicating that most of the population prefers the color blue (44% in the US, 33% in Russia) and an overwhelming majority of those surveyed prefers horizontal landscapes, showing a distaste for abstract compositions. When confronted with the results, the philosopher and scientist Noam Chomsky "was not surprised at all by the way people answered Komar and Melamid`s polls. Landscapes, he mused, seem a natural point of return once humanity has reached the end of its creative capacity with paint and brush."
The resulting Most Wanted paintings created using the survey answers, while containing the elements that elicited the most positive responses, were anything but synergetic. Together with the charts showcasing the outcome of the polls, Komar and Melamid`s The People`s Choice, is an eloquent argument describing why popular appeal is not necessary for the creation of great art. - Shipping Info
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