DO Web devotees have a different outlook on life from the rest of us? If you believe the stereotype of spotty kids surfing the night away in the sanctuary of their bedrooms then you’d probably say “yes”. On the other hand, Web culture has become so pervasive that one might expect it to reflect all of society.
Who knows? Well, Alex Mellamid and Vitaly Komar believe they have at least part of the picture. And you don’t need to wade through reams of research data to see the difference—it literally stares you in the face.
Originally from Russia, Komar and Mellamid became famous for their iconoclastic approach to art. Last year, this dynamic duo—who now share a studio in Soho, the fashionable heart of New York’s art world—decided to conduct an online poll to find out what Net users think about art. The result of their survey is a picture that embodies the aesthetic likes and dislikes of those who responded. On the Web this week, at , the artists unveiled the image, a strange hybrid cityscape that owes as much to statistical analysis as it does to artistic expression.
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By applying statistics to aesthetics, Komar and Mellamid believe they are pioneering a new fusion between art and science. “The Western world is going through a crisis of values, especially in the art world where nobody knows any more what is good or bad art,” says Mellamid. In this climate, they hope that statistics might act as a new basis for values. Here is a literal painting by numbers—a style of art that springs from the will of the people and, like science, is grounded in empirical data.
Mellamid and Komar have been making waves on the international art scene for more than two decades by painting clever parodies of Russian socialist realism. Here, they poked fun at socialist propaganda. One image showed Bolsheviks returning home after a demonstration to be greeted by a tiny yapping alligator, while another portrayed Komar and Mellamid as ironic, heroic communist youths trumpeting a fanfare to Stalin.
The political establishment retaliated by removing the pair from their teaching jobs and from the artists’ union. Denied legitimate careers, they decamped to the West in 1977, coming to New York via Israel.
Their new work is a radical departure from this earlier theme. Take, for example, the image unveiled this week. Designed strictly by numbers, it rigorously reflects the results of the Net survey. Since 40 per cent of the 2500 respondents said that blue or green was their favourite colour, 40 per cent of the picture is blue or green. And because 82 per cent liked nonrealistic imagery, the work has a distinctly modernist feel. It was inspired in part by Picasso, who turned out to be the Net users’ favourite painter.
Rural setting
A question about favourite artistic settings presented more of a problem. Some 35 per cent of poll respondents chose a cityscape, 28 per cent preferred a waterscape, while 14 per cent opted for a rural setting and 11 per cent a forest. Here the most popular choice ruled, but by painting New York the artists managed to accommodate the second choice as well by including a vista of the Hudson River.
Net users are not the only group that Komar and Mellamid have polled. Since 1993, they have conducted surveys in the US, Russia, France, Turkey, China, Kenya, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Portugal and, just recently, Germany and the Netherlands. In each poll, respondents were asked for their colour preferences, as well as whether they preferred historical figures, such as Lincoln and Jesus, or more recent figures such as John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley. Did they prefer to see figures naked, partially clothed, or fully clothed? If they wanted animals, did they prefer them wild or domestic? Stylistically, did they prefer to see “bold stark designs” or “more playful, whimsical designs”? Did they prefer sharp angles or soft curves, geometric patterns or random uneven patterns?
In each country Komar and Mellamid tabulated the findings and used them as the basis for painting a “most favoured” and “least favoured” picture. Visitors to their Web site, which is sponsored by the Dia Center, the Manhattan-based art foundation, can also see these national images and peruse the results of the polls.
Much to the artists’ surprise, the findings from all the national polls turned out to be very similar. People like much the same thing: a landscape dominated by water and sky, a few people, and some wild animals. When it comes to beauty, this “blue landscape” represents a universal ideal, says Mellamid. “The Soviet state or an elitist art academy can manipulate art to its own ends, but ideology cannot change numbers,” Mellamid says. “Numbers are innocent. They do not lie.”
But what about the survey of Netties? Although they too opted for a blue, outdoor scene with several people and a few animals, they rejected the rural environment. Their choice of a cityscape, says Mellamid, represents a big change from the country polls.
Also, while the country polls revealed an overwhelming preference for realistic images, Net users went strongly in the other direction. So while the “most favoured” paintings for the individual countries are all variations on a traditional 19th-century landscape, the Net users’ picture is very much a 20th-century aesthetic.
But the biggest difference between the Net poll and the national polls came from a different area altogether. In the polls of countries, people generally expressed clear likes and dislikes. Yet the Net poll revealed a high degree of ambiguity. In question after question, many respondents chose to answer “I don’t know” or “It depends”. Because of this ambiguity, Komar and Mellamid could not clearly separate likes from dislikes, and so instead of creating a most favoured and least favoured image for the Web community, they combined the two into a single work.
True to the spirit of cyberspace, the Net users’ image is also a virtual artwork, existing only as a file of bits and bytes. All the national images are handpainted in oils, but the Net image was compiled with computer graphics. They scanned in details from several Picassos and a Rembrandt, along with a postcard scene of New York and various other images. These fragments were then manipulated, using digital painting techniques, to make the final image. The result is “truly awful”, Mellamid admits. “The blue landscape is so much nicer,” he says wistfully, glancing into the corner of their studio, where China’s most favoured painting hangs.
What do the two artists make of the Net users’ rejection of their platonic ideal? It merely shows, says Mellamid, that well-educated people are aesthetically confused. They “either genuinely don’t know what they like, or they have been led to believe by their education that they ought to like something more sophisticated than a simple blue landscape”, he says. In other words, the more people know about art the less they know what they like.
Educated confusion
Demographic data bears out that Netties are a good deal more educated than the population at large. In the American poll, 29 per cent of respondents had college degrees, yet in the Net poll 70 per cent of respondents worldwide had university degrees. Mellamid points to the high proportion of “don’t know” answers by Web respondents. They have “lost contact with the pure ideal within”, he says.
If all this is beginning to sound like something out of Monty Python, behind the project lies a serious issue. In an age of pluralism and multiculturalism, when no one group—the upper classes or communist apparatchiks—can dictate taste, what might be a new foundation for aesthetic values? Given that in the modern world we have come to regard democracy as the ideal tool for making social and political decisions, Komar and Mellamid began to wonder whether it might also serve as a way for defining taste in art. Why not produce art via that premier tool of political democracy, the public opinion poll?
From the beginning, then, their aim was to produce an art of the people, for the people and, of course, by the people. Rather than simply being spectators to the creative outpourings of individuals, in this project “the population at large become participants in the process of artistic creation,” Komar stresses.
It is the democratically inclusive aspect of the project that Komar believes most important. In this sense the project reflects the duo’s socialist heritage. “We were brought up with the idea that art belongs to the people,” says Mellamid. “I still believe that the people’s art is better than aristocratic art, whatever it is.”
Ironically, then, it is just this notion of art by democracy that has most enraged people. When the Komar and Mellamid Web site was selected by Yahoo as “Cool Site for the Day”, their e-mail box overflowed with messages from irate cybercitizens objecting to what they saw as a desecration of the process of artistic creation. Similarly, when the US poll was written up in the American political weekly The Nation, the magazine found itself flooded with letters from offended readers, who also hated what they saw as a sacrilegious attitude to art.
It seems, says Mellamid, that “art is the last refuge of the sacred”. People are deeply offended by the incursion of statistics into this realm. But why is this so, he asks? Society already conducts polls to decide about everything from whether to raise taxes and restrict immigration, to who should govern us and who is the sexiest person on Earth. So why should art be singled out as an exception? If we trust statistics as a guide to politics and sex appeal, why shouldn’t we trust it as a guide to art?
