Focus Group Art

KillBot writes "What's the most pleasing image to casual art viewers? Two deer and a hippopotamus in a mountain lake on a partly cloudy day with people relaxing near the shore. According to a survey of 1,001 adults by two Russian artists, they like wild animals, water, ordinary people having fun and the color blue. And this made me laugh, the most unwanted painting shows randomly scattered, overlapping triangles and rectangles in shades of gold, orange, peach and tea. Nando Times is carrying the full story. "

Go to the source:

See the paintings [diacenter.org] here.

Re:The idea is not art by focus groups

The point is that there are a lot of artists who are seriously out of touch with the kind of art that ordinary people want to have around them.

I'd have to disagree... artists might be out of touch with the kind of pretty pictures that people want on their walls, but that's not really the purpose of Art with a capital A... Art should challenge viewers, produce a reaction - if it also happens to be pretty enough to enjoy on a wall, so much the better, but that is not its primary purpose, I'd say...

And this exhibit tells you exactly why this is true: left to his/her own tastes, the mythical Average Person chooses remarkably similar things, as dictated by some atavistic primate brain's comfort level. This is exactly what Art should seek to challenge!

Unfortunately, this makes Art an elite pursuit, but its always been true that things like high art and pure science are luxuries available only after basic needs are met: people painted in caves only after they'd finished hunting that antelope.

Then again, I'm a scientist/engineer - so what do I know about art?

Where is the creativity?

If these paintings [diacenter.org] [credit pi31415 for the link] are all that the people had a chance to look at, no wonder they gravitated to the "landscape with water, animals, people and the color blue." That's almost all that was there! The only other types of paintings available were "geometric shapes,""yellow house scene," and "something with elvis." That's not very representative, IMHO.

What about Dali with his weird distorted objects? What about some indoor scene? What about a sunset?

There isn't much detail on how this "study" was done, but it appears to me to not have been particularly well done--unless there are details I'm not aware of.

Re:Komar and Melamid rule!

I have this CD; it's definitely not popular with my wife, but I love it. Not only do I get to hear my favorite instruments together (bagpipes, banjo, accordian), but they really, really go out of their way to be dowright obnoxious. Near the end they try to finish of the few remaining listeners by having a woman shouting political slogans into a bullhorn.

The interesting thing about the project is that they aren't trying to produce a bad song, but a good song that practically nobody would like. Unfortunately, they're foiled by covariance.

Playing the CD for others, I noticed something interesting. With the exception of musicians, very few adults can stand to listen to the "least wanted" song, but whenever I've played it it for children, they have a blast; they jump around and dance and sing along loudly and off-key. They're absolutely delighted by its deliberate obnoxiousness.