GibburtKomar & Melamid’s Most and Least Wanted Art
The internet is an inexhaustible resource of awesomeness, ceaselessly revealing delightful nuggets of oddity to all who seek them. A series of works by Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid is the latest one that I have stumbled across. In the mid-90’s, they embarked on a project to determine which features people in different countries most and least desired in a painting. The data gathered through their polls was then used to create the works of art that the population of the respective countries should statistically like and dislike the most. The results turned out to be eerily similar: it seems that most people in the world enjoy landscapes with lakes and either historical or religious figures the most and abstract cubism the least. Only the Dutch displayed a strange animosity towards impressionism.
Even better than the series of paintings, though, is their People’s Choice Music project which was created by much the same method. Their “most wanted song” is a banal soul-pop piece, while the “least wanted song” is an extended 25-minute composition in which a children’s choir and an operatic soprano sing and rap about cowboys, holidays, shopping and politics. All of this is orchestrated with tuba, harp, bagpipes, accordion, banjo and flute and features drastic shifts in volume, tempo and mood. According to Komar and Melamid, only 200 members of the world’s population are supposed to enjoy the “least wanted song”, but obviously it doesn’t actually work out that way. The piece is simply too brilliantly bizarre to not be utterly captivated by it. By contrast, the “most wanted song”, which 72% of humanity is supposed to enjoy, is simply dull beyond belief. To be fair, for me as a progressive rock fan, the “least wanted” song is not all that different from many of the things I usually listen to. 
And it’s worth pointing out that these projects are, of course, not only a satire of mainstream taste, but also of opinion polling.
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