In a conversation about public art, and how the communities I work with seem vehimently opposed to the concept, my girlfriend told me about a fascinating study that was conducted by artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, to determine aesthetic preferences and taste in painting for various countries.
[ul][li]China[/li][li]Denmark[/li][li]Finland[/li][li]France[/li][li]Germany[/li][li]Netherlands[/li][li]Iceland[/li][li]Italy[/li][li]Kenya[/li][li]Portugal[/li][li]Russia[/li][li]Turkey[/li][li]Ukraine[/li][li]United States[/ul][/li]
Of all the countries, only the Netherlands expressed a preference for abstract art. Otherwise, the resulting “people’s art” tended to have a traditional style.
Frankly, I’m a bit surprised by these survey results, and I suspect skewed selection bias in the responses. Maybe a few art academigs decided to rigg the survey.
If it IS true, I got no idea why we Dutch would like modern abstract art better then that variation of “people walking in a landscape” .
Perhaps we are snobs and figurative art is “old school?”
Possibly better/more art education in the general populace? I find, anecdotally, that those of my friends with some fine art/art history education tend to be more appreciative of abstract art than those who don’t.
Dutch person here. I am at a total loss to explain this finding. Better art education? I really don’t think so, I would say there’s hardly any art education going on. This also means that there’s not school buses full of young people being dragged to the Rijksmuseum or the Van Goghmuseum, so maybe it’s the lack of indoctrination with non-abstract art. Another suggestion could be that the Netherlands played something of a role in the earlier days of abstract art, what with Mondriaan and the Style and everything, and that this might result in some sort of subliminal indoctrination that people elsewhere aren’t getting, but why would this be true for Mondriaan and not Kandinksky, Picasso or Bauhaus? It doesn’t make any sense. At the end of the day, I believe chances are that this finding is due to some error in measurement or sampling or something like that.
Personally, however, I do like abstract art, let that be known.
How fascinating! I’ll have to go back and read some more – why do all the landscapes have a left-to-right flow? Were people offered landscapes with the same elements in different orientations?
As to the OP, maybe the Dutch are just more mellow right now? So they can handle some chaos in their art? I don’t think you can say artistic preferences are better or worse, so long as we’re talking about competent art - isn’t it a reflection of the zeitgeist?
It would be really interesting to see the results of the same study in 20 years.
Funny thing is, I’ve seen lots of people in the American Midwest who love abstract art. I know people who are selling it, plenty of it. The people who say they prefer something in a survey aren’t necessarily the ones buying art, even at modest prices.
This is very interesting. I adore abstract art (especially of the geometric variety, which appears to be universally scorned by the public, judging from the results of the study), but I would figure that paintings that would appeal to the biggest part of the population would be a classic oil portrait or perhaps a landscape in water color or something else classic and harmless in that direction.
It seems that they included different examples of paintings as opposed to just, say, genre descriptions. That might’ve had an effect.
I respect Italy’s choices. Their least wanted painting is a tacky mash of overused symbols and their most wanted is, although not in my taste, somewhat abstract and open for interpretations.
I think it might have to do with the fact that the “old school” of painting is just what it is : the photographers of the day.
I appreciate the craft that comes in to making a Rembrandt, but I don’t think he had a whole lot of interesting paintings, most of them were basically portraits.
I like my art to do a little more then just show me what reality looks like.
Italy’s is abstract, too. It’s not completely non-representational, but it’s certainly abstract.
As to the OP, I don’t know. It’s always seemed to me that the Dutch have a more progressive and modern art and stylistic sense. I absolutelyloved the old guilder banknotes for their strong, modern graphic design and typography–I always thought those banknote designs were quite progressive in terms of the world’s currency designs, which tend to be pretty old-fashioned and ugly overall.
Anyone else notice the most wanted is almost always larger than the least wanted, which tend to be book size? It’s no secret that giant paintings are amazing, as it serves as escapism and all that. The ones where the least wanted painting was bigger than the most wanted were all garish geometric abstractions. Not good geometricl abstractions, like Sol, but garish ones. Holland had a magazine size abstract painting that, if blown up to huge portions, would also have been garish. The other one, that hideous descendant of impressionism, was just that - hideous.
Looking over the site more, it’s positively a joke. I didn’t pay attention my first go round, but an international study in that many countries would have to have a better website. Further, the paintings they use, even the “best” ones, all suck. It seems to be some sort of attempt at stereotypes - notice how there is a similar composition in the most wanted paintings of the first four countries - but it’s not really humorous.
