The Most Wanted Paintings
The Most Wanted Paintings reflect the artists' interpretation of a professional market research survey about aesthetic preferences and taste in painting. In an age where opinion polls and market research invade almost every aspect of our "democratic/consumer" society (with the notable exception of art), Komar and Melamid's project poses relevant questions that an art-interested public, and society in general often fail to ask: What would art look like if it were to please the greatest number of people? Or conversely: What kind of culture is produced by a society that lives and governs itself by opinion polls?—Michael Govan
Komar and Melamid's survey of The Most Wanted Paintings gets the online treatment in this project commissioned by Dia. The ultimate "Judgement of Taste" in the form of a marketing survey.
In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato's idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that's how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created. In a way, this is the same thing; in principle, it's nothing new. It's interesting: we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It's absolutely true 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 get to the truth. Truth is a number.
-Alexander Melamid
This project was commissioned by the Dia Center for the Arts with funding from Chase Manhattan Bank.