JoAnn Wypijewski, editor
Painting by Numbers
Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art
$25.95, £17.95 paperback
9780520218611
Available Now
205 pages, 45 color illustrations, 4 b/w photographs, 2 maps.
November 1998, Not available in British Commonwealth
Also in: Sociology of Popular Culture
November 1998, Not available in British Commonwealth
Also in: Sociology of Popular Culture
What is art? 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 bêtes noires of Soviet cultural commissars, the Russian émigré 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 The Nation Institute and a professional polling team, 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 commissioned in ten other countries—including Russia, China, France, and Kenya—representing almost one-third of the world's population. Essays by JoAnn Wypijewski and noted art critic Arthur Danto, as well as an interview with the artists, explore the crisis of modernism, the cultural meaning of polls, the significance of landscape, and the commodificaion of just about everything.
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 commissioned in ten other countries—including Russia, China, France, and Kenya—representing almost one-third of the world's population. Essays by JoAnn Wypijewski and noted art critic Arthur Danto, as well as an interview with the artists, explore the crisis of modernism, the cultural meaning of polls, the significance of landscape, and the commodificaion of just about everything.
"The project documented in Painting by Numbers is a choice example of their sensibility: funny, prickly, complex, humane, dense with implications and a baited trap for ideologues and hypocrites."—Luc Sante, New York Times Book Review
"From the opening page, which offers 'America's most wanted' painting (dishwasher size, as preferred by 67 percent of the representative sample), the reader becomes a participant in a radical happening, 90s-style, complete with polls, global travel, and practical jokes. . . . Komar and Melamid's coauthorship is dialectical; it reflects a desire for belonging to the people, to history, to the majority, as well as an émigré estrangement—at once a mental ghetto and a vantage point."—Svetlana Boym, Bookforum
"Wypijewski and Nation art critic Arthur Danto explain well the context of Komar and Melamid's unique project and chart its odd, zigzag path between comedy and seriousness. . . . An important reference point on the map of late-20th-century taste."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Review
"Invigorating. . . . Nothing is sacred, no one is left out and no 'art' event—even the manufacture of a blue M & M—goes unremarked. Most enjoyable are the remarks on color by Wypijewski . . . whose meditation comes alive with solid writing and references to thinkers such as Goethe and Kandinsky."—Publishers Weekly
"A wonderfully tricky work of art."—New York Times
"From the opening page, which offers 'America's most wanted' painting (dishwasher size, as preferred by 67 percent of the representative sample), the reader becomes a participant in a radical happening, 90s-style, complete with polls, global travel, and practical jokes. . . . Komar and Melamid's coauthorship is dialectical; it reflects a desire for belonging to the people, to history, to the majority, as well as an émigré estrangement—at once a mental ghetto and a vantage point."—Svetlana Boym, Bookforum
"Wypijewski and Nation art critic Arthur Danto explain well the context of Komar and Melamid's unique project and chart its odd, zigzag path between comedy and seriousness. . . . An important reference point on the map of late-20th-century taste."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Review
"Invigorating. . . . Nothing is sacred, no one is left out and no 'art' event—even the manufacture of a blue M & M—goes unremarked. Most enjoyable are the remarks on color by Wypijewski . . . whose meditation comes alive with solid writing and references to thinkers such as Goethe and Kandinsky."—Publishers Weekly
"A wonderfully tricky work of art."—New York Times
Komar and Melamid page at the Dia Center for the Arts site
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