Most Wanted Painting

A few weeks ago I stumbled on something that really piqued my interested. That something is one of the projects of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Russian "nonconformist" artists. Some of their collective works were controversial enough to get them expelled from the Soviet Artist Union (1973) and arrested from an art show in 1974. Later, many of their works were destroyed by Soviet authorities at another art show. By1978 they were living in New York city and worked on various projects together, and in 1994 they came up with an interesting idea: to find out what the most popular painting would be (by nation).

You can find their project here. To give you a little glimpse, this is what they found to be the most popular type of painting in the US (this was done by using extensive polls questioning people about different aspects of their preferred art):

(dishwasher size)

Note George Washington, a family, and a group of deer. Apparently they found that people liked historical figures to be in their paintings so they determined that George Washington was the most popular.

This is their depiction of the USA's least favorite painting:

(paperback size)

Now, most of the countries have similar paintings denoted as their most popular--landscapes with lots of blue, trees, mountains, a few animals, etc. But then you have countries like...

Holland

(magazine size)

Germany

(37.5 cm x 37.5 cm)

Italy

(dishwasher and television size)

....And incidentally, some of these same countries had the most unique "least favorites" as well (most were tiny and abstract like the US's):

Holland

(wall size)

I especially think Italy's is funny because It has Elvis and a Power Ranger in it. Do they have something against American pop culture? Granted, I think it is the ugliest painting on the list too, but it's still funny to me that they picked those things to put in the painting.

If you go to the link I provided at the beginning of the post, you can see the favorite and least favorite paintings for all 15 countries surveyed; you can see the results (and questions) of the survey; and read a description of the project. I would really recommend going there. It doesn't take long to see the paintings and it is really quite interesting (though I'm sure not to everyone).

Apparently later they decided to poll all of Webdom and come up with the Internet's most and least wanted paintings:

Most:

Least:

I'm not sure I agree or understand the reasoning behind everything that is in the paintings based on the survey questions...but it is interesting to see what Komar and Melamid came up with, anyway.