Peoples choice painting

THE ART WORLD — — The old cliche refuses to die.  “I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like.”

Really?  You’re sure about that?  Because to cite another cliche, “be careful what you wish for.”

Look.  Here is “America’s Most Wanted” painting.

Note the lovely lake where the deer and hippo play.  And who could miss, front and center, George Washington himself?  This is America’s Most Wanted?  This?

“What is striking about America’s Most Wanted,” wrote critic Arthur C.

Danto, “is that I cannot imagine anyone really wanting it as a painting.”

But back in the mids, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid did the polling, held town meetings, and painted precisely what “the people” wanted.  Their “People’s Choice Project” was seen as “funny, prickly, complex, humane, dense with implications and a baited trap for ideologues and hypocrites.”

Before polling, Komar and Melam