Essay: Finding Freedom in Paintings & The Responsibility Of The Artist to Facilitate Social

Change

     With an intent to discover what true people’s art would look like, Kolmar and Melmaid, a Russian collaborative artist team, created a research survey for their project for the most wanted and most unwanted paintings in fourteen countries. In 1994, they began the process which resulted in America's Most Wanted and America's Least Wanted paintings, which were exhibited in New York at the Alternative Museum under the title "People's Choice." The Most Wanted work is perhaps the most ironic and cliché painting of all. Roughly “dishwasher sized”, the piece features a misty outdoor scene with a mountain, trees, a deer, children and of course George Washington. The Least Wanted, on the other hand, is paperback sized, abstract, geometric, with bold primary colors and no distinguishable figures. As for the thirteen other countries, all but two had a similar aesthetic to that of America’s most and least wanted: An outdoor scene with water and a mountain, non-domestic wildlife (be it a moose in Canada or a Hippo in Kenya), children playing, and some sort of national figure or symbol. Exhibited again in the eleven other countries, the least wanted paintings were geometric, non-figurative abstract works. Once completed the least wanted paintings were deemed the more successful, innovative, and aesthetically pleasing by those surveyed when asked to choose which one they liked best.