ABSTRACT
With the exception of the ΝΕΑ witch-hunt of the late 1980s and early 1990s, no art event in years has garnered the kind of attention the U.S. media devoted to Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s ongoing project “The People’s Choice.” Media coverage ranged from tabloid to highbrow and all across the artworld spectrum. For those willing to take the artists at their literal word, “The People’s Choice” was a frank attempt to show how the relationship between artists and the broad public might be transformed. For those more skeptical of the artists’ professed intentions but sympathetic nonetheless to the strategy, the project was a refreshing means of challenging elite uses of the fine arts and asking how artists might be more accountable to popular taste about art. For those who cared not a whit about the interrogation of taste, “The People’s Choice” could be read as pungent commentary on the statistical machinery of the modern corporate state.
