Marketing--
The Final Frontier?

by Richard Ledes

"The Most Wanted Paintings"
by Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid
Website of Dia Center for the Arts, New York, NY
http://www.diacenter.org/


France's Least Wanted Painting by Komar & Melamid.
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  • Not only computers have memories. And ours are constantly involved in a kind of interaction, and this interaction is frequently modeled on metaphors borrowed from computer technology: something we spot as we walk or drive linking us to some other place we once visited, and then to some other "subdirectory," such as "childhood" or "animals not included under other subdirectories." Some artists presenting work on the Web have taken advantage of this elementary kind of interaction by linking their projects to the history of the Web itself, pointing to the Web's role as a frame--like cartoon figures that suddenly erase the background of their own world, and appear to address us with the awareness that they are on TV. These works of art are designed to create a spark by illuminating obscured connections. One currently much discussed example of this kind of interactivity was produced by the Russian emigre artist team of Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. It is entitled The Most Wanted Paintings, and is on display at the site maintained by the Dia Art Foundation. Komar and Melamid, having obtained funding from Chase Manhattan Bank, began their web project by hiring a marketing research company to conduct a survey in the U.S. asking people a series of questions regarding what they liked and didn't like in a painting: "Traditional or modern?" "What color do you like the most?" etc. On the basis of the responses, Komar and Melamid were then able to construct their own versions of America's "Most Wanted Painting" and "Least Wanted Painting;" they have since expanded their project to fifteen other countries. The surveys are on display along with the paintings, and visitors to the site are invited to provide their own answers to the survey. The paintings themselves are capable of provoking a guffaw. They display a deadpan employment of marketing statistics; they commit themselves to aesthetic decisions about what should be in a painting in a way that mimics decision-making about what should be included in an advertisement for a car. What makes these sources of laughter and bemusement resound is the way they bring to mind the commerical possibilities of the Internet. These possibilities have recently made the Web glow brightly as a new financial frontier, a frontier drawn with the same golden terms as those that previously served westward migrations. The comic quality of these works awakes the infant history of the net in the bombshelter days of the postwar period. The net grew up with a use of statistics that was catapulted into national service to win the Cold War. The use of the Web to gather statistics about its users is now heralded as the first important commercial possibility for the Web. The paintings by Komar and Melamid can be seen as an ironic comment on this use of demographics to pinpoint our desires. The fact that these two artists have previously created works satirizing the Soviet bureaucracy in which they were raised suggests the historical complexity of the relationship between the two Leviathans that fought the Cold War. The surviving combatant might be conceptualized as a kind of cyborg Leviathan, in whose belly we sit at our screens.



    Photo Credit: "France's Least Wanted Painting" by Komar & Melamid
    Dia Center for the Arts

    © Richard Ledes 1996