Some things are universal and work just fine; a good toothbrush can be marketed to the majority of people brushing their teeth, a good saucepan will do the job for most people and a toothpick doesn’t need to be anything but clean to be adaquete enough to used by anyone.

The utilitarian side of things isn’t subjective — if you’re warm because of your winter jacket, the product works and no-one can tell you otherwise. But when it comes to the problem of aesthetics, fashion, design, looks… there’s where it gets a bit more tricky. 

“The Most and Least Wanted Paintings” was a project done between 1995 and 97  by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. Their premiss was simple:

Go out and ask a bunch of art consumers and non-consumers what they like. Take a large sample of their aesthetic preferences — colour, style, size, motif etc. — and make an average assessment of what the most (and least) popular works of art are and why. Then, make such art to be sold back to the masses and buy a yacht (allegedly).

They wanted to find the “perfect art piece” for each country in which they conducted their survey and create it in the end.

Just like 120 beats per minute pop songs, that tend to be the music industry’s standard because of their relatability, they wanted to make the Despacito of the art world. 

(Our hearts beat about 60 times a minute when we’re idle, so 120 is fast enough to be upbeat but slow enough to sync with our body’s natural rhythm.)

They found that a painting needed to be predominantly blue, as this was most popular across all countries where their study was conducted. In most of the countries the most popular motif was a landscape with a tree and a hill, boulder or other rock formation on the left and a bit of sea or lake on the right of the work, a semi-cloudy blue sky above and a few people or animals going about their day.

Except for Holland — they wanted a magazine-sized blue, green and red blotch, bless their hearts.

After they had created the “perfect work of art” for every country, naturally they decided to sell their work to the masses — expecting an overwhelming amount of interested bidders.

The result?

They sold exactly zero paintings. Not even one was bought, not even the blotchy one the Dutch allegedly fell in love with. And the message was clear.

While the power of statistical averages can absolutely turn any real, living and breathing thing into a collection of numbers, it also takes away an important part of the artistic experience — the art.

Be it because the works were just too “average” or that Komar and Melamid just weren’t as good at marketing as they were at painting, I believe that especially now in today’s world their message is getting clearer and clearer.

You can’t make art for everyone, because no-one will like it in the end. Even experimental disco-videos of sheep would’ve probably been more popular with the public than their “perfect art”, because if nothing else, you can always count on 1 person to like some outrageous thing, but for everyone to like one particular thing — especially if that one thing is average in every way — that’s almost impossible.