Lately, when I have time, I've been reading Komar and Melamid's Painting by Numbers. It's fascinating for what it says about the kind of intelligence provided by polling.

This holds true for a similar polling-based project of theirs concerning music. In both cases, phone polls probed the most and least wanted qualities of paintings and music.

The results are interesting, particularly because the least-wanted works are far more engaging than the most-wanted (although Ithaca's most-wanted painting is pretty semiotically impressive).