This American Life

  

I love This American Life.  Words cannot express how much I adore the idiosyncratic stories that make up the hour-long radio show.  It often comes up in dinner conversation by saying, "I was listening to This American Life the other day and I heard that..."  There's one episode in particular that I just love called Numbers.

"Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want. It turned out to be a landscape, with a mountain and a lake, and deer, and a family, and George Washington. Then they applied these techniques to music, with composer David Soldier. They surveyed audiences about what kind of instruments and topics they liked most in their songs. Then they produced one song based on what people most want to hear—and one song based on what they hate the most. The one people hate includes bagpipes, children singing, lyrics about holidays and religion, wild volume and tempo changes."

The thing about both experiments is that the artwork resulting from what people want is completely weak and uninteresting; like a Thomas Kinkaid painting.  However, the painting and song that were created out of everything that annoys people ended up being different and amazing.  You can go to Melamid and Komar's website and buy the songs or you can listen to the streaming episode for free.

The experiment reminds me of an ancient Greek sculptor that allowed fellow Grecians to critique his sculpture of an ideal feminine beauty and he would make changes as requested.  The resulting sculpture was considered grotesque.

It also reminds me of a contemporary French performance artist named Orlan who has been undergoing multiple plastic surgeries to combine the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, nose of Jean-Leon Gerome's Psyche, lips of Francois Boucher's Europa, eyes of French School of Fountainbleau's Diana, and the forehead of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.  Entitled The Reincarnation Of Saint Orlan, the project began in 1990 to morph herself into an ideal beauty as suggested by men who paint woman.  She even makes the act of plastic surgery into performance art by staying awake and reciting poetry while filming the procedure. A few stills of the operations can be seen on her website.  I love her.  She's extreme but fascinating.  By combining all of these various elements of feminine beauty she's making herself look rather disturbing, but in a very feminist way...there's lots of articles about the whole thing.