Creative by Committee

I often get annoyed when working on certain projects at work when too many people are involved in the creative process. If you have any more than 3 people with significant say in creative decisions, and those people are particularly opinionated, you are almost guaranteed for trouble. It is rare that 3 or more people will be like-minded enough to agree on any given creative decision. Should the background be this color or that color? Should the shape of the piece be square or rectangular? Should the headline say this or that? The best case scenario is usually that someone decides that they don't feel strongly enough to argue with the others, and those others get their way. The worse case scenario is usually attempting to please everyone at once by combining everyone's ideas. For example:

The above picture is by a pair of artists named Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. In 1994, they decided to create America's Most Wanted painting. They hired a polling firm to interview Americans about what they liked to see most in a piece of art, and what they disliked in art. The result is the fabulous painting above. We Americans like to see landscapes, groups of people, the color blue, political figures (hence George Washington standing in the center there) and animals. Luckily, we aren't alone. They eventually did the same exercise in 13 other countries, and if you look on their website (www.diacenter.org/km), you'll see that most of the other countries they did this in the produced nearly identical results. The only country that preferred abstract art was Holland. I don't know why.