Komar and Melamid

Komar & Melamid's first joint exhibition, Retrospectivism, was held at the Blue Bird Cafe in Moscow, 1967.

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, hosted their first international exhibition, but Soviet authorities denied them permission to attend.

In 1978, they moved to New York; in the same month, their first museum exhibition opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

They collaborated on various conceptual projects, ranging from painting and performance to installation, public sculpture, photography, music, and poetry.

In one such performance, they established a corporation, Komar & Melamid, Inc., that had as its purpose "the buying and selling of human souls."

Komar & Melamid created their first public art sculpture in 1986, a bronze bust of Joseph Stalin, which was installed in the red light district of The Hague, Netherlands.

In the early 1990s, Komar & Melamid created two icons for the Holy Rosary Church in Jersey City.

The book, Painting by Numbers: Komar & Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art, published in 1997, explains the statistical underpinnings of the polling process and provides the results of each country's preferences.

Komar & Melamid used the same process in 1996–1997 in a collaboration with composer Dave Soldier to create The People's Choice Music, consisting of "The Most Wanted Song" (a love song with low male and female vocals, of moderate duration, pitch, and tempo) and "The Most Unwanted Song" (in part: an operatic soprano raps over cowboy music featuring least-wanted instruments bagpipes and tuba while children sing about holidays and advertise for Wal-Mart).

In 1998, Naked Revolution, an opera about George Washington, Vladimir Lenin and Marcel Duchamp, was created by Komar & Melamid with Dave Soldier and performed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and The Kitchen, New York.

It became part of the exhibition American Dreams, along with a series of eight paintings, forty collages, and the artists' collection of George Washington memorabilia.

In 2001, Komar & Melamid began work on their last major project together, Symbols of the Big Bang, first exhibited at the Yeshiva University Museum, Center for Jewish History, New York.

Komar and Melamid's People's Choice series, 1994–1997, consisted of the "most wanted" and "most unwanted" paintings of 11 countries, as well as two songs in the same vein.

"[4] Komar has said he isn't so concerned that people actually enjoy the work, so long as it provokes thoughts of free will versus predetermination.