Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art

What is beauty? Who defines it? And why is high art so remote from most people? With the same puckish humor and critical genius that made them the betes noires of Soviet cultural commissars, the Russian emigre art team of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid takes on not only the billion-dollar American art industry but also capitalism's most venerated tool: the market research poll. With the help of a professional polling firm, they discovered that what Americans want in art, regardless of class, race, or gender, is exactly what the art world disdains — a tranquil realistic blue landscape. Painting by Numbers includes the original questionnaire and reproductions of the “most wanted” and “most unwanted” paintings the artists made based on American survey results and on polls they exported to nine other countries — including Russia, China, France, and Kenya — representing more than one-third of the world's population. Essays by JoAnn Wypijewski and noted art critic Arthur Danto, as well as interviews with the artists, explore the crisis of modernism, the cultural meaning of polls, the significance of landscape, and the commodification of just about everything.