America's Most Wanted Painting

There’s a few radio shows I always try to catch; “This American Life“, “Car Talk“, and “RadioLab.” When you’re sitting around animating for hours, radio shows are the perfect entertainment. Well, AC/DC is also pretty good, but I digress.

This week’s episode of “This American Life” was a rerun from about ten years ago, and it dealt with people using numbers to understand things that are not easily explained by numbers. One of the five segments covered an artistic duo,  Komar & Melamid, who make art using polling data. One of their projects was to make two paintings each for a group of countries, one painting that the polls said everyone would like, one painting that, statistically, everyone would hate.

Luckily, they also applied this to music and made two songs. The song that everyone should enjoy is a bore. The song that everyone should hate, “The Least Wanted Song,” is amazing. People who were surveyed said they didn’t like rap, soprano opera, cowboy songs, children singing, tuba, bagpipes, holiday songs and commercial jingles. The song has a soprano opera singer rap about cowboys while being backed by tuba and bagpipes, while she’s frequently interrupted by children singing holiday songs and commercial jingles. The polls said most people would like a song to last about 3 minutes. The Least Wanted Song lasts 22. I think Chris Robinson would like it.

The best part, I think, is that the artists did not just lay on the dissonance and cacophony. That would be too easy. The Least Wanted Song is a real song.

So, should we, as artists, give the audience what they don’t want? Tough to say. This does, however, clear up some thoughts I’ve had. Making your audience angry or confused just for the sake of the reaction seems sociopathic to me, but also lazy. It’s as bad as making your audience cry with worn-out Hollywood cliches. An artist should work harder than their audience, and throwing in unpopular elements to make things interesting in itself won’t make your art better. The use of unpopular elements, though, will lead an artist to think in new ways. Maybe not good ways, but an artist’s job is as editor of their own work. Cut out the crap, leave in the good stuff. I think the use of unpopular elements in The Least Wanted Song effected the composer’s ideas more than it effected the audience’s reaction.

Listen to it HERE! The children singing about Labor Day will be stuck in your head!