1 Data Visualization

Internet users of a certain age will recall a moment in the latter half of the 1990s when a duo of artists working under the name Komar and Melamid rose to fame online. After emigrating from the Soviet Union to New York in the late 1970s, Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar achieved a degree of success in the art world as founders of a movement they called Sots-Art, a blend of conceptual art and playful critiques of Stalin-era Soviet realism. The work was witty and biting, merging irony and politics to the point where it was sometimes difficult to tell which was which. In 1994, Komar and Melamid launched a project with the support of the Nation Institute, for which they hired a professional opinion polling firm to ascertain what features of fine art painting were most and least popular among Americans.