Sarah’s and I carry on a weekly tradition of tuning into podcasts of This American Life. In act two of Episode 88 Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar explained their contribution to the artistic world in relation to the weekly theme of the show Numbers.
This is how it works. They hire a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings in different countries across the world. Then, using the poling data, they create paintings based on what the country’s people statistically would like to see. On the flip-side of this, they also create paintings of what people would least likely appreciate. The resulting works can be found here. The painting shown above is America’s favorite painting, the result of the data shown here.
But then they took it a step further. They teamed up with musical composer David Soldier. Using the same poling procedure, they produced one song based on what people most want to hear—and one song based on what they hate the most. Read about it here and listen to the song “fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy” here.