Even those not into art criticism or contemporary art may enjoy Painting by Numbers, a book about the Most Wanted project. Komar and Melamid themselves are just fun, managing to be provocative and unconventional without being incomprehensible or pretentious, and the project is of relevance outside the art world, for disciplines such as anthropology and cultural studies.
Painting by Numbers contains three major pieces. The first is an interview with Komar and Melamid, in which they talk about themselves, the Soviet Union and the United States, and art generally, as well as about the Most Wanted project. In the second JoAnn Wypijewski writes about the public participation in and response to the project. And in the third art critic Arthur C. Danto provides a more traditional essay on Komar and Melamid and America's Most Wanted.
Also included are the questions and results from the United States survey, as well as the summary results from similar polls carried out in other countries — China, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Kenya, Russia, Turkey, and the Ukraine. The illustrations in Painting by Numbers include Komar and Melamid's renditions of the Most and Least Wanted Paintings for all the countries surveyed, as well as others of their works. And the last sixty pages contain a full demographic breakdown of the results from the United States poll. (The more interesting bits of this are covered in the text, so this could have been relegated to a web site without loss.)
April 1999
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- details at University of California Press
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