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

There should be a warning on the cover of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid's Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art: This is not a book. From the opening page, which offers "America's most wanted" painting (dishwasher-size, as preferred by 67 percent of the representative sample), the reader becomes a participant in a radical happening, '90s-style, complete with polls, global travel, and practical jokes. Komar and Melamid, two emigre artists who launched their American career in 1979 with a project of buying and selling souls, have now taken on the nature of art, democracy ("the people's choice"), and artistic authority. What is the universal language of the '90s: painting or numbers? Is there any universal language of beauty at all or do we now fully inhabit a postmodern multitude of taste? Who is the author or coauthor of popular fantasies?

Komar and Melamid pledged to create "painting for the people," thus fulfilling the promise of both Socialist Realist art and capitalist advertisement. After conducting the first scientific poll of artistic tastes from Kenya to China, they made a shocking discovery. The most wanted painting, regardless of race, class, and gender, turned out to be a realistic, rather than (as the poll phrased it) "different-looking" landscape, dominated by the world's favorite color, blue, and featuring several people in the foreground - some famous, some ordinary (fully clothed was the preference in the United States, partially nude in France). The least wanted painting was invariably done in the style of geometric abstraction. Whether the results stemmed from a prejudice against nonrepresentational styles or a suspicion of anything "different-looking" remains unclear. Of the American poll results, Komar comments, "In a society famous for freedom of expression, freedom of individual, our poll revealed sameness of majority. Having destroyed communism's utopian illusion, we collided with democracy's virtual reality."

Besides collaborating with each other, Komar and Melamid have collaborated with elephants, with history (in the project "What Is to be Done with Monumental Propaganda"), and with Stalin (in the remaking of Lenin's mausoleum). This time, they are collaborating with the silent majority of the democratic state. The subtitle - "Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art" - evokes two ideas of scientific truth: the Soviet Marxist-Leninist, and the American. Komar and Melamid do not parody either of these ideas. Instead, they dramatize their implications. If their fellow ex-Soviet artist Ilya Kabakov builds his installations on the threshold of individual obsessions and aesthetic dreams, Komar and Melamid build on the dream of the collective - from communist utopia to virtual democracy - and its grotesque distortion.

Komar and Melamid's coauthorship is dialectical; it reflects a desire for belonging to the people, to history, to the majority, as well as an emigre estrangement - at once a mental ghetto and a vantage point. For instance, even the world's favorite color does not represent universal serenity for these artists. Their blue is "different-looking." Komar associates blue with his first encounter with the West. On board the Boeing that carried him to the United States, he visited the toilet, flushed, and got the greatest surprise of his life: dark blue, the color of freedom, the color of the artificial heaven of consumer goods. It is from this resident-alien perspective that Komar and Melamid search for the people's choice, and a universal language.

The dream of a universal language was the dream of modernism. According to Melamid, people believed that the square was what could unite people, that it was truly universal. But the blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all mankind. The Russian Futurist movement began with a manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." At first glance, it might appear that Komar and Melamid's project is a defense of public taste, a slap in the face of modernism and the art establishment. Yet the specter of modernism haunts the post-Communist artists.

For there is trouble in the paradise of the blue landscape. In America's Most Wanted, the eyes of the wandering George Washington never meet the gaze of the contemporary vacationers. in Russia's Most Wanted, the Jesus Christ look-alike seems to turn his gaze away from the laboring youth. They inhabit the same painting, but seem to exist on different planes. The smooth surface of these paintings is deceptive. Like Total cereal, the paintings have an extra helping of everything the people want without any interrelationship among the ingredients. Something is deliberately out of joint. In fact, the seamless surface is a collage.

Each of the paintings in the book seems thoroughly quotational, often citing from a national tradition. The triangles in Russia;s Least Wanted resemble those of El Lissitzky or Wassily Kandinsky, while the mother's unclad breasts in France's Most Wanted vaguely evoke Delacroix or Manet (as well as some amateur pictures from the beach in Normandy). None of the blue landscapes, however, was executed en plein air. Instead, an ideal landscape based on the work of Italian painter Domenichino was used as a template. The blue landscape, then, does not depict anyone's native soil, but rather a paradise within, a nostalgia for freedom. "Making people hermits for a second - maybe that is the basic idea of art," writes Komar.

Yet the citational texture of the paintings does not suggest a post-modernist multiplicity of narratives. The ironic artists take their blue landscapes seriously. It may be an artistic cliche, but for many people the blue landscape represents a moment of disinterested contemplation of almost Kantian beauty in everyday life. What is common to those polled is not so much their attachment to nature as their shared everyday dream of the beautiful. The kitschy, partially clad humans and animals that seem to come from international calendar art only deepen the strangeness of the background's haunting blue.

In his essay "Can it be the 'Most Wanted Painting' even if nobody wants it?" Arthur C. Danto writes that "Komar and Melamid are postmodern artists who yearn, as in a way we all do, for the sweet innocence of premodern art." In my view, if there is any nostalgia here, it is a nostalgia for the modernist belief in the role of art in society and in the possibility of any kind of aesthetic universal language, not necessarily that of abstraction. Komar, dissenting for a moment from his coauthor, confesses his hope that people who come to see the "Most Wanted" series "will become so horrified that their tastes will gradually change." Is their project a perverse defense of aesthetics via negativa?

The artists, trained in conspiratorial techniques, realize that the only way to speak publicly about art, at least in American society, is by speaking about polls. In fact, the statistical graphs in the book themselves resemble abstract paintings. Modernist styles have been transferred into life, celebrating the victory of science, statistics, and the media. But at a focus-group discussion in Ithaca, New York, Komar raised the following question: If he ate one chicken and Melamid ate none, would the statistic say that each of the artists had eaten half a chicken? Even if Alex actually had gone hungry? A statistics professor who was participating in the discussion explained that his method was concerned with chicken consumption in general, not with individual eating habits. At this point, the hungry artists realized that the statistical approach might threaten the nature of their collaboration.

It has often been suggested that in contemporary society, polls have replaced politics and polity. Even though the pollsters and statistics professors openly acknowledge that theirs is a limited science, it has been made to function as the true representation of the people's choice and is repeatedly manipulated by politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Seemingly the most democratic tool, statistical analysis is frequently used as the most authoritarian one. It doesn't describe a demand, but constructs it. Komar and Melamid, however, take the polls at face value. This literal-mindedness, coupled with fantastic technology, is characteristic of much of American media culture. The artists reveal its absurdity. The "most wanted," calculated with the help of the polls, is what nobody wants - except those who order the poll.

The graphic organization of the book allows for many divergent readings. At times I found myself less interested in the statistical charts than in the individual fantasies of the ideal artwork gleaned from focus groups and printed in small letters at the bottom of each page: "the dying Republican," "something I cannot imagine and have never seen before," and "me driving a Ferrari through The Octopus by Caravaggio." The "Most Wanted" are usually fugitive. Ultimately, the search for the elusive people's choice and the universal language of art proves to be more inspiring, insightful, and surprising than the "Most Wanted" paintings themselves.

Painting by Numbers almost resembles a coffee-table book. And what else can one do but produce such a book in a time when the editors of major presses cancel their contracts with authors after limited polling of salespeople in chain bookstores? In a recent New York Times article, one of these culture managers commented that the shelf life of an average book is somewhere between radicchio and cultured yogurt. A "different-looking" book might not sell. Komar and Melamid offer us ways of cheating the system in this age of polling and virtual reproduction.

Svetlana Boym is professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia.