Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art

Language: English

Published by Farrar Straus Giroux November 1997, 1997

0374228809 / 9780374228804

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Seller: Hennessey + Ingalls, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.Hennessey + Ingalls

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Hardcover

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Item description from seller

What is beauty? Who defines it? And why is high art so remote from most people? With the same puckish humor and critical genius that made them the betes noires of Soviet cultural commissars, the Russian emigre art team of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid takes on not only the billion-dollar American art industry but also capitalism's most venerated tool: the market research poll. With the help of a professional polling firm, they discovered that what Americans want in art, regardless of class, race, or gender, is exactly what the art world disdains -- a tranquil realistic blue landscape. Painting by Numbers includes the original questionnaire and reproductions of the 'most wanted' and 'most unwanted' paintings the artists made based on American survey results and on polls they exported to nine other countries -- including Russia, China, France, and Kenya -- representing more than one-third of the world's population. Essays by JoAnn Wypijewski and noted art critic Arthur Danto, as well as interviews with the artists, explore the crisis of modernism, the cultural meaning of polls, the significance of landscape, and the commodification of just about everything. With the help of a professional polling firm, ex-Soviet art critics Komar and Melamid discovered that what Americans really want in art, regardless of class, race, or gender, is exactly what the art world disdains--a tranquil, realistic 'blue landscape'. Komar and Melamid provide a comic and profound discussion of art in our time. Full color art throughout.

Seller Inventory # 20110214130486

Title
Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art
Author
Vitaly Komar, Joann Wypijewski, Alexander Melamid,
Publisher
Farrar Straus Giroux November 1997
Publication year
1997
Condition
Used - Very Good
Binding
Hardcover
Language
English
ISBN 10
0374228809
ISBN 13
9780374228804
Seller catalogs
Art - Artists, A-Z

Hennessey + Ingalls

Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.

4-star seller

AbeBooks seller since April 8, 2013

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Since its founding in 1963, Hennessey + Ingalls has grown to fill a unique niche in American retailing. Our store is the largest art and architecture bookstore in the western United States, and it is probably the largest retail operation in the country dealing just with books on the visual arts.

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