19/7/2014 Denis Dutton on Komar and Melamid

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Americas Most Wanted, and Why No One

Wants It.
in Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 530-43.

Denis Dutton

www.den i sdu t t on .com

Lets imagine offering to discover for Americans their

Most Wanted Food. To be accurate and avoid
inappropriate elitism, we do a careful, demographically
adjusted survey of gustatory preferences, hiring the
Gallup organization to conduct scientific polls, renting
church halls for focus groups (videotaped), and talking
to everyone who wants to be heard. Its expensive, to
be sure, but we manage to persuade a respectably
liberal nonprofit foundation to fund our research after
all, were finding out what the people want. As the
results come in, we discover that Americans tastes in
food are wide-ranging, whimsical and imaginative, often
traditional, but also ethnic in every direction. Despite the
vast variety, however, we determine that numerically
dominating the food taste list are preferences for
hamburgers, pizza, ice cream, and chocolate. So we put
our culinary skills to work and come up with the
ultimate dish. Here, America, is your Most Wanted
Food: hamburger-flavored ice cream with chocolate-
coated pizza nuggets. Eat it!

This is precisely the stunt perpetrated by Russian emigr

artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid with their
painting, Americas Most Wanted. Looking through
their book, Painting by Numbers: Komar and
Melamids Scientific Guide to Art, edited by JoAnn
Wypijewski (Farrar Straus Giroux, $50.00) you have to
wonder how their supporters and accomplices (they

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take up two pages of acknowledgements) must in

retrospect feel about having gone along with these
chaps. Komar and Melamid oversaw an extensive poll
of the art preferences of people worldwide. Subjects
were asked what they would like to see a picture of,
whether they preferred interior or landscape scenes,
what kind of animals they liked, favorite colors, what
kinds of people and whether clothed, and so forth.
Taking the aggregate results, our artists produced the
most wanted and least wanted paintings for each
nationality. Typically, the least wanted painting was an
abstract design of jagged shapes featuring a thick
impasto and the disliked colors of gold, orange, and
yellow.

Americas Most Wanted (click on image to see a larger version)

Invariably (with the one exception of Holland, which

chose abstraction), the most favored painting was a
mostly-blue landscape with water, people, and animals.
Their Americas Most Wanted combined a liking for
historical figures, children, and wild animals by placing
George Washington on the banks of an attractive river
or lake. Near him walk three clean-cut youngsters,
looking like vacationers at Disneyland, while in the
water behind a hippopotamus bellows. To consider the
survey seriously and then turn to its painted results is to
realize youve been conned. Its as though Marcel
Duchamp had managed to secure foundation funding for
an extensive cross-cultural study of aesthetic
preferences in plumbing before presenting the world
with Fountain.

When I tried a couple of years ago at an American

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Society of Aesthetics meeting to entice Alexander

Melamid into admitting that Americas Most Wanted,
which was then being unveiled, was really a joke, he
quickly walked in the other direction. I found this rather
exasperating, and I sense another kind of exasperation
(uncertain if it shouldnt be bemusement) in the
conversation recorded in the book between Komar and
Melamid and the editors of The Nation. The artists
cannot only paint in any style youd like, they can serve
up theoretical stew in any flavor you want. Most of
what they say is a pseudo-profound mish-mash of
clichs, truisms, and nonsense. Why the worldwide
preference for blue landscapes? Komar: I believe it
reflects peoples nostalgia about freedom....You know,
we are not free....if ...life is not an act of free will....In
search of freedom, of blue landscape, we can at any
time open the big door that leads out of this room....But
most of us are not capable of suicide; we are afraid to
find out maybe behind this door there is another
installation, another, different-colored landscape. And
on, and on. They mention the idea that the attraction of
the blue landscape is genetically imprinted, but drop it
fast. At one point Komar proclaims that the poll is an
ideal grotesque of ideal art, which cant have much
reassured the editors of The Nation that their money
was well spent. The words of Komar and Melamid
express persistent hint of ridicule, both of The Nation
and of the ordinary people whose artistic opinions and
preferences were so earnestly sought.

In order to emerge from the project with dignity intact,

The Nation editors try to reduce the issues to politics.
This is especially prominent in the major chapter of the
book, written by The Nations managing editor, JoAnn
Wypijewski. Consider her interpretation of what the
poll said about color preferences. The survey found
that, like every other country in the world, Americas
favorite color was blue, with an overall rating of 44%.
(Americas Most Wanted therefore was painted with
44% blue, which is again a joke: if 71% of the
population prefers chocolate ice cream, it does not
follow that everybodys favorite ice cream is 71%
chocolate.) Blue was most preferred, notes
Wypijewski, by people living in the central states
(50%), between 40 and 49 years of age (49%),
conservative (47%), white (46%), male (45%), making
$30,000 to $39,900 (50%), and who dont go to
museums (50%). However, since the poll was only of
1001 people, and had a margin of error of 3.2% (that
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is, 3.2% either side of the figures she so precisely

provides), these nuances dont mean anything at all,
compared as they are with the nearly identical figures
for women and other income groups. For a moment it
seems clear that a liking for blue tends to decrease with
education: 48% for high-school-or-less, 34% for some
postgraduate education. But even this correlation is far
less than it appears: turn to the back of the book and
examine the actual tables and you discover that there
werent 1001 postgraduate interviewees, but only 103;
the margin of error in that cohort would be around
12%. Since the high-school-or-less group consisted of
only 421 people (margin of error probably 5%), it is
statistically possible that the blue preferences of these
two groups actually coincide or are even the reverse of
what the poll appears to report. The point, nowhere
explained in the technical apparatus (Wypijewski is
oblivious to it) is that if the margin of error of a poll of
1001 people is 3.2%, it does not follow that any
question asked of a fraction of 1001 respondents
possesses the same level of accuracy. So while it may
well be, as the poll reports, that Blacks and Hispanics
are less likely to favor blue than Whites, it could be a
much closer thing than the 15% preference gap given
here, since there were only 100 Blacks and 66
Hispanics interviewed.

Desperate to impose her political views on this wispy

evidence, Wypijewski turns to The Lscher Color Test,
which, she explains, first came into use by
psychologists in 1947, and that is supported by a
twelve-page list of scholarly papers, mostly in German.
She owes it to her readers to supply some more detail
on this diagnostic test; as she fails to do so, Ill do it for
her. Prof. Dr. Max Lscher, who is head of his own
Institute of Psycho-medical Diagnostics in Lucerne, has
patients give a rank ordering of color preferences from
which he is able to gain insight into the causes and
psycho-vegetative structure of symptoms or complaints
providing a structural therapeutic strategy for
psychotherapy and homeopathic therapy. These
miraculous results can be accomplished in a five-minute
session, and with computer assistance can determine
the state of 34 personality traits according to 5015
precise definitions. Skeptics are referred to Dr.
Lschers book, The Law of Harmony Within Us,
now in its sixth edition.

Applying the Lscher Diagnostic to the color

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preferences of Americans, Wypijewski is able to

analyze the national personality, although she refrains
from prescribing her choice of homeopathic therapy
(severely watered-down Marxism, Id wager). She
discovers that the countrys greatest hope is for a
tranquil environment in which things proceed in an
orderly fashion, along more or less traditional lines, and
in which it has a measure of control over events.
Spooky, I hear America saying, its so true! Dr.
Lschers test must be for real! But the Lscher analysis
goes deeper: the United States seeks excitement and
exhilaration but feels somehow obstructed in its
desires...obliged to forgo some pleasures. It can feel
satisfaction, but at its back there is a whisper that all
might be fleeting. To which Id add that America is
probably going to meet a dark and handsome man. But
whether hed much care for America is uncertain: you
see, America doesnt like yellow, which suggests
alienation and profound insecurity, a sense of hopes
disappointed, ground lost, and fear that there may be
no way out. It all indicates an urgent clinging to
tradition as a hedge against insecurity rather than a
simple continuity and a dis-ease or outright
intolerance toward that which is unfamiliar.

It may sound a bit like astrology, Wypijewski admits,

adding in breathless italics, but what if it were true?
How about insecurity?, she asks. The poll shows that
the lower a persons income, the more he or she loves
blue as a first color choice, and the higher the income
the greater the love of the color of money (people who
make more than $75,000 a year are three times as
likely to favor green as those who make less than
$20,000). Some might suggest that fondness for green
shows how ecologically-sensitive the American rich are,
while the other end of the spectrum prefers blue
because of its blue collars, but Wypijewski doubtless
would be offended by such a flippant analysis. For the
past two decades, she explains, the great mass of
Americans have seen their futures fade as their wages
have fallen or stagnated. Fortunes have risen only for
the top 20%, and of those only the top 1 percent have
done extremely well. Since 1979, forty-three million
Americans have seen their jobs be erased, while
families crack under the strain....great slabs of nature
have been sold off to the lords of industry, rivers run
foul with mine tailings and timber debris, capital is
ruthless, and government remote or actively complicit.
Waco. Oklahoma City. Cries for the death penalty, and
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for the losers revenge upon the losers. Thats what

liking blue gets you.

Wypijewski then turns to preferences for black, pointing

out that the poll shines a tiny light onto the split nature
of black. Its far tinier than she realizes. Those with
incomes under $20,000 are twice as likely to prefer
black as those with incomes over $75,000. But those
who go to museums most are also about twice as likely
to prefer black as those who dont go at all. African
Americans are more partial to black than whites as their
second favorite color, although the same percentage of
them (4%) prefers black as their favorite color as do
whites. Does this show that black is, as she suggests,
emblematic of defiance and the underprivileged? Why
do people with incomes under $20,000 tend to like
black more than the rich? Does it indicate the black
mood of the destitute? Is it their love of the black flag of
anarchy? Are these people largely poor African
Americans still stirred by the idea that Black is
Beautiful?

The real answer, completely missed by Wypijewski, will

jump out at anybody with an eye for fashion who
examines the tables of figures: there is an apparent
preference (8% as opposed to 4%) for the color black
among people aged under 30, including students and
young people who are not yet in paying careers, and
who therefore fall in the less-than-$20,000 category as
well. The poll was taken a few years ago during a
period when among many students and young people
black was in vogue for clothing. Its not the poor and
dispossessed who are defiantly expressing their
preference for black, its high school and college kids
listing their current clothing and hair-tinting preferences.
Poverty and deprivation doesnt determine the gap in
black preference between these young people and their
elders with incomes over $75,000; its the current youth
culture, which also goes in for dark blue fingernails and
nose studs.

But even here theres less than meets the eye: its those
pesky error rates again. The preference of all voters
was 4% for black. Remember, that is 4%, 3.2%.
However, the 4% preference for African-American
voters, since there were only a hundred of them, was
actually 4%, 12%. Similarly, there were only 95
people in the $75,000+ group, so their first-preference
rating for black of 3% should read: 3%, 12%. As
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there were only 155 first-preference color voters with

incomes below $20,000, their 8% preference should be
given as 8%, 10%. Believe it or not, it is in light of this
meaningless mirage of statistics that the managing editor
of The Nation proposes to instruct us on the politics of
color preference.

However, not all of the statistical evidence adduced by

the poll is as pointless as this. In fact, some of it is very
valuable indeed, and deserves to be closely studied by
anyone concerned with the current state of aesthetics.
For the sample of the poll extended across nine
countries beyond the United States: China, Denmark,
Finland, France, Iceland, Kenya, Russia, Turkey, and
Ukraine. Extended cross-culturally, this larger sample
did reveal some persistent and statistically solid trends,
and on those questions which were applied across
national groups the error margin is less that 3%. As
Ellen Dissanayake shows in the present issue of this
very journal (pp. 486-96), this broader poll does
suggest indeed, inadvertently discovers the
existence of a set of universal interests in art or, if the
word art seems too grand, pictorial representations. I
refer all readers to Dissanayakes essay as the only
scientifically informed comment on Komar and Melamid
yet to appear in print. In contrast to Dissanayakes
article, the contributors to Painting by Numbers are
marked by their refusal to acknowledge that the poll
stands as serious empirical evidence for a natural,
evolved universal aesthetic preferences. At the core of
this reluctance sits the deeply engrained doctrine that all
experience is passed through the lens of culture, indeed,
is constituted by culture.

In the field of aesthetics, Arthur C. Danto has over the

last thirty years argued continuously in one form or
another for what might be termed the social-
constructionist (or theory-constructed, or artworld-
constructed) philosophy of art what the philosopher
George Dickie has formalized as Institutional Theory. It
is not surprising, therefore, to see Danto, who is art
critic for The Nation, defend a profoundly flawed,
social-constructionist reading of the Komar and
Melamid poll. Nor is it surprising to see him do it with
such characteristic wit and eloquence.

Danto has followed the careers of Komar and Melamid

since 1978, and frankly admits that at first he had
trouble with their work. They had produced a series of
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landscapes by a one-eyed nineteenth-century artist

named Nikolai Buchumov, who is as much their
fabrication as the Buchumov oeuvre. Later they
exhibited burned fragments of soup-can paintings
pseudo-Warhols seemingly retrieved from a fire as
well as a most appealing Morris Louis-type co-
production with a painterly elephant in the Toledo zoo (I
happen to adore the painting). Danto appreciates the
humor in all this as well as importance of their most
searing paintings, bitter send-ups of Socialist Realism
produced when there was still a Soviet Union, such as
one which shows Stalin as the inspiration for the
invention of art.

After his warmly admiring account of the collaborative

career of Komar and Melamid, Danto is less keen when
he turns to Americas Most Wanted. He is bothered by
George Washington and a hippo sharing the same
scene, a conjunction he unwisely analogizes to Newt
Gingerichs Contract with America. The paradox of
wanting to reduce taxes and eliminate the federal deficit
does have a solution (cut spending); theres no similar
conflict in Americas Most Wanted, just incoherence. It
is a painting, Danto admits, that has no place in the
world of art at all. It is mischievous, and he finds the
true paradox to be the fact that the putatively most-
wanted painting turns out to be a painting no one
actually wants.

So far, so good. But when he discusses the results of

the world-wide poll Danto can come up with nothing to
throw any light on the issues. He finds it perfectly
predictable that a poll of American tastes should yield a
landscape in Hudson River Biedermeier style. What
does surprise him is that throughout the world the
results have been strikingly congruent, in the sense that
each countrys Most Wanted looks like, give or take a
few details, like every other Most Wanted....And it is at
the very least cause for reflection that what randomly
selected populations of the world round most want are
paintings in the generic, all-purpose realist style the
artists invented for Americas Most Wanted. The most
wanted painting is something of the kind that embellishes
calendars from Kalamazoo to Kenya. And then Danto
blurts out a remark which, if true, would undermine a
generation of art theory (including Dantos own its-
theory-that-makes-art art theory): The 44-percent-
blue landscape with water and trees must be the a priori
aesthetic universal, what everyone who thinks of art
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thinks of, as if modernism never happened.

Having thrown down this hypothetical challenge to his

own most deeply held aesthetic commitments, Danto
then tries to explain away this uncanny cross-cultural
uniformity: It is possible, of course, that everyones
concept of art was formed by calendars (even in
Kenya), which now constitutes a sort of paradigm of
what everyone thinks of when they think of art.
Referring to psychological research that shows that
there are paradigms that govern what people will think
of first when asked to identify something in a category
(asked to name a bird, people will usually say robin or
sparrow, not albatross), Danto tries to argue that
calendars have come to govern worldwide what people
think of when they think of art. If this is true, he
suggests, it would also explain the worldwide resistance
to modernism mentioned above. It is altogether likely,
he says, that what Komar and Melamid have
unearthed is less what people prefer than what they are
most familiar with in paintings. And he then adds, most
surprisingly, I would wager that the unrepresentative
population at the museum opening [presumably any
museum opening] shares the same paradigm.

But what then do people really prefer? The theory that

underlies Dantos analysis is that picture preferences are
infinitely malleable, that there are no underlying
preferences that are not socially constructed, or derived
from everyday experience, just as thinking of a robin
(instead of an kingfisher) when asked to imagine a bird,
or thinking of a man (instead of a woman) when asked
to imagine an airline pilot, are stereotypes inductively
derived from walking in the park or flying in airplanes.
There is a denial at the heart of Dantos view: the denial
that there might be some kind of identifiable category of
natural interests in pictorial representations. For Danto,
it all must come down in the end to enculturation, social
brainwashing, to the extent that he even suspects that
the kind of crowd that comes along for free chardonnay
at art openings share the same socially constructed art-
stereotypes as the rest of the populace.

That would be why, Danto continues, when

throughout history anything has deviated significantly
from the predominantly blue landscape, the spontaneous
response has been that it is not art. The true villain in
the persistent, worldwide resistance to modernism
roughly, abstraction must ultimately be the calendar
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industry: Why else would the Kenyans, for example,

come out with the same kind of painting as everyone
else even though 70% of them answered African to
question 37 If you had to choose from the following
list, which type of art would you say you prefer?
when the other choices were Asian, American, and
European? Danto then concludes his discussion with
three stunning sentences; for claritys sake I number
them: (1) There is nothing in the least African about the
Hudson River Biedermeier style of landscape with
water. (2) But it may be exactly with reference to
such images that Kenyans learned the meaning of art.
(3) It is no accident that in the Kenyan questionnaire, in
response to the question on what types of art people
have in their homes, 91 percent mentioned prints from
calendars (though, in fairness, 72 percent mentioned
prints or posters).

As regards (1), who says theres nothing African about

the painting? The literature to which Dissanayake refers
imputes the genesis of environmental aesthetic interests
and preferences to the demands and opportunities of
the hunter-gatherer life of our ancestors in the
Pleistocene. The universal appeal of Americas Most
Wanted could well lie in its resemblance to a lake or
river scene in east Africa a hundred-thousand years
ago. The paintings gold frame, along with Washington
and the deer, imply Hudson River School to the
knowledgeable critic, but remove the people and
animals and the scene merely suggests a generic lush
forest surrounding water anywhere from New Zealand
to Alaska to Asia to Africa. Danto the art critic is
responding to what he perceives as a style; the basic
illustrative content is not even exclusively North
American, let along Biedermeier or Hudson River
School.

Regarding (2), yes, familiarity with such images will

affect what Kenyans view as art. But that does not in
itself explain why in culture after culture such
representations of bluish, lushly summery landscapes
retain their appeal. Calendar brainwashing reminds me
of the kind of argument, often trotted out by tone-deaf
Marxists, that Beethoven retains popularity because
capital has a vested interest in keeping people listening -
as though theres nothing intrinsic in Beethovens music
that people find arresting. In actuality, its the reverse:
capitalists can make money off Beethoven because
people find pleasure in the music independently of
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anybodys profit or loss, independently of the demands

of social class, independently of any authority who tells
them they ought to like it. Turning back to the Most
Wanted paintings, the question is, do calendars incline
Kenyans to like these sorts of pictorial representations
(which Danto seems to believe dont even reflect
Kenyan reality), or do both the calendars and the
picture preferences quite independently of one another
tap into some deeper inclination a landscape interest
or preference that is not socially constructed, but a
Pleistocene inheritance? It is at this pivotal point that
Danto, along with everyone else in Painting by
Numbers, has nothing to say: in fact, they dont
recognize the question, because it does not fit the
social-constructionist paradigm within which their
thinking is constrained.

Therefore, when Danto adduces as support for his

supposition (3) that calendars determine Kenyan taste,
that there is a non-accidental (91%-of-sample)
relationship between the presence of calendars as a
kind of art in Kenyan homes and Kenyas Most
Wanted in other words, that we have here a causal
relationship he is stretching his social constructionism
beyond the breaking point. The question is not how the
sinister, multinational calendar industry manages to
subvert taste and populate the whole world with blue-
landscape liking zombies (at the same time making art
education such an arduous, uphill slog for the right-
thinking proponents of modernist abstraction wanting to
spread the good word). The tantalizing question is, why
is there such a persistent preference for the blue, watery
landscape?

Painting by Numbers is such a strange melange of

disparate elements: Wypijewskis left-wing politics, the
endearing whimsy and veiled ridicule of Komar and
Melamid, the mostly dodgy, partly useful statistics, and
Dantos theoretical misdirections. Add to this the
verbatim reports by Americans of the things theyd want
if they could commission a painting (My cat, A
painting of the atomic nucleus, A lizard walking across
the desert straddled by this guy Phil I know, etc.), and
throw in the astounding reaction to the survey from art
establishment authorities at a symposium at the Whitney
Museum: the idiocy of these blue landscapes; its like
asking illiterate people to judge poetry. What a dogs
breakfast of a book. But I still love Komar and
Melamids colorful 1996 collaboration with the Toledo
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elephant, Painting with Renes Footprint. Good

work, Vitaly, Alexander, and Rene!

Copyright 1998 Johns Hopkins University Press.

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