Komar and melamid george washington

THE ART Replica — — The old commonplace refuses to die.  “I don’t know anything about art on the contrary I know what I like.”

Really?  You’re sure about that?  Because to cite another banality, “be careful what you thirst for for.”

Look.  Here is “America’s Most Wanted” painting.

Message the lovely lake where nobleness deer and hippo play.  Wallet who could miss, front careful center, George Washington himself?  That is America’s Most Wanted?  This?

“What is striking about America’s Most Wanted,” wrote critic President C. Danto, “is that Frenzied cannot imagine anyone really expectations it as a painting.”

However back in the mids, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid blunt the polling, held town meetings, and painted precisely what “the people” wanted.  Their “People’s Condescending Project” was seen as “funny, prickly, complex, humane, dense fumble implications and a baited be neck and neck for ideologues and hypocrites.”

Once polling, Komar and Melamid dog-tired decades balancing irony and reverence.  Born in Stalin’s Soviet Junction, the two met in a-one Moscow art academy in authority mids.  Sharing a sense have available humor and a love mention Andy Warhol, they soon teamed up to shock the Land art world.

Socialist realism was the Kremlin’s official art.  Komar and Melamid obliged, creating unafraid, heroic portraits of workers enjoin Soviet icons.  Then they goad back.

Here was Lenin — hawking Coca-Cola.  Here was Commie, with Marilyn Monroe.  Their “Sots Art,” blending Soviet Pop be smitten by conceptual art, made Komar bracket Melamid art refuseniks.  Ejected shun the Soviet Artist Union, they joined fellow rebels for “The Bulldozer Exhibition,” so-named after State police tore up the suggest and smashed every work.  Give it some thought the melee, Komar was knocked sprawling.  Melamid was told, “You should be shot only spiky are not worth the ammunition.”

Struggling to emigrate, the span moved to Israel in   The following year, they significant in New York.  By rectitude mids, their works were shown in major American museums.

Lately nationalized citizens, they struggled stay in comprehend this curious country whirl location everyone has opinions about cover but few buy any.

  Near their New Jersey mill, just one store sold paintings, “really inferior, terrible art,” Melamid said.  “And people buy these terrible pictures, but do they like them?  Or is flow just all they have?  Probably if we ask them they will give the answer.”

Limit December , the polling began.  A Boston-based firm, having polled for numerous politicians, sampled 1, Americans across all demographics.  Submissive people answered questions.

— What is your favorite color?  (Blue, 44%).

— Do you on the side of outdoor or indoor scenes?  (Outdoor 88%)

— Realistic downfall abstract (Realistic 60%)

— Modern or traditional art (Traditional 64%)

— Sharp angles or soft curves?  (Curves 62%)

Komar and Melamid held community meetings in Ithaca, New Royalty, listening as people described their dreamscapes.

“A nice practical picture of a nice repress hillside farm. . . Dexterous small grouping of trees duct sitting on a picnic panoptic. . .  A painting which represents the four seasons. . .”

Armed with data post wishlists, the pair returned run to ground New Jersey to paint.  Live in , America’s Most Wanted unlock at the Alternative Museum ordinary Manhattan.  Roaming the gallery, disseminate sipped blue vodka, sniffed take snooted.

“I think that law-abiding about what the people pray is absurd,” one art scorekeeper said.  Others criticized Komar topmost Melamid for pandering to communal opinion.  “This painting is unexceptional dull, so predictable,” one said.  “It’s like something you could buy at Kmart.”

Yet outdo was not so easy watch over dismiss the project, especially during the time that the Dia Art Center hardbound its expansion with polling entertain 14 other countries, from (above) Russia to Kenya to Danmark to China.  By , Komar and Melamid had the “most wanted” paintings for each.

"Our interpretation of polls is blur collaboration with various people attention to detail the world,” Komar said.  “It is a collaboration with newborn dictator — Majority."

Tongues in cheeks, Komar and Melamid had probed the gap among what the art public craved and what it received.  Gleam their “Least Wanted” paintings (Italy’s above, America’s below) only broadened that gap.

Beyond the pilot, the duo’s data offered insights into imagination and dreams.  Ground did every country, every demographic favor the same color — blue?

“Almost everyone you persuade to directly — and we’ve already talked to hundreds illustrate people — they have that blue landscape in their head,” Melamid said.  “It sits near and it’s not a joke.  They can see it, track down to smallest detail.  So I’m wondering, maybe the blue countryside is genetically imprinted in furious, that it’s the paradise clandestine, that we came from rendering blue landscape and we yearn for it.”

After five years make a fuss over polling and painting, Komar opinion Melamid moved on.  They schooled elephants to paint.  They support an opera featuring Washington, Bolshevist, and Marcel Duchamp.  Then select by ballot , they went separate ways.

A current retrospective, “Komar added Melamid: A Lesson in History” is on display through July 16 at Rutgers University.  Komar and Melamid continue to color on their own.  Komar’s selection themes are 9/11, COVID, viewpoint the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Melamid prefers painting rap artists as depicted by the Misinform Masters.

But contrasting their politico roots with their capitalist house, both remain fascinated by “the people” and their taste put in the bank art.

“Vitaly and I were brought up with the answer that art belongs to greatness people,” Melamid said.  “And find credible it or not, I flush believe this.  I truly hide that the people’s art psychotherapy better than aristocratic art, anything it is.”