I sense a bias among many artists, and in the responses posted to this survey, against landscape in favor of abstract being automatically “better” and “more educated”; that landscape is kitsch. However, abstract only came along in the last 100 years or so. We can’t ignore the art of the millennia before that. Landscapes/pictorial art can and have been very symbolic, and most people today have lost the ability to “read” them. (Reference Jan van Eyck’s “Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride”, 1434, for a whole raft of symbolism.) Don’t generalize landscapes any more than you would generalize all abstract painters. Perhaps that is what bugs me most about the survey, of course it has to be all generalized questions and generalized responses. (truth in advertising: i primarily make landscape and pictorial quilts and no doubt this sensitizes me.)

Numbers may not lie, but statistics can be interpreted in many ways. I disdain the polls voting for “woman of the year” sort of thing; of course it is just name recognition. If 10 million people vote for their own mother and just 100 people vote for the First Lady, the First Lady would therefore receive the most votes.

What does a question like “Prefer more serious or more festive?” mean to different cultures? A Day of the Dead painting may be quite festive in some cultures and abhorrent in another. And looking at some of the statistics, in some countries a significant number of people responded “it depends”. Did that skew the results?

Comparing the age groups of the responses to the education level, it became even more meaningless, not being able to draw direct connections between the two. Someone “under 25″ with a grade school education is much different than someone “60 to 64″.

It all falls apart as a scientific study, but it is amusing if not taken too seriously.

I was amused by the Italians’ least preferred painting. I understand it to mean they are tired of old paintings of martyrs that must be scattered through museums and churches all over their country; they have to leave them there for the tourists, especially those Elvis fans.