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Komar & Melamid are a team of artists in New York who emigrated from Russia in 1965. Their work has ranged from paintings satirizing Soviet iconography to "The People's Choice," which used polls and market research to create the "Most Wanted" and "Least Wanted" paintings for various countries and cities. (Landscapes with lots of blue are the universal favorite.) In other words, they have repeatedly used art to make art look silly and pompous.

Now they are teaching elephants how to paint. It all started when they read reports of the plight of domesticated elephants in Asia, whose numbers have dwindled in recent years from 11,000 to only 3,000. The elephants used to make a good living hauling trees in the logging industry, but deforestation of the countryside has led to bans on teak logging. There aren't many opportunities for 6,000-pound mammals in the Asian job market. The elephants and their keepers, or mahouts, were forced to scrape by on performing tricks for tourists or doing illegal logging work at night.

Komar & Melamid had heard about elephants that painted in American zoos, including Ruby, whose works raised more than $100,000 a year for the Phoenix Zoo before her death in 1998. They took the idea to Asia, opening the world's first elephant art academy in Lampang, Thailand, in November 1998. In 1999 their Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project started two more academies, near Ubud in Bali, Indonesia, and in Kerala, India.

In the art classes, elephants work with trainers to learn to hold a paintbrush in their trunks and to make basic strokes across a canvas. "We try to stay out of artistic decisions," says Melamid, the spokesman for the duo. The elephants' abstract creations are beginning to sell to tourists who visit elephant camps. Last year the works raised about $5,000 in Lampang, "which is big money for Thailand," Melamid says. And this week, on March 21, paintings by elephants were auctioned at Christie's in New York. (One painting by Ganesh, a 6-year-old Indian elephant, went for $2,100.)

Of course, the project has implications beyond keeping elephants off the dole. Are these paintings just a kind of circus trick, or are the elephants really creating art? In an interview in the New York studio he shares with Komar, Melamid took a puckish delight in the puzzles and paradoxes the art of elephants presents.

How does an elephant get into art school?

The schools are started at elephant camps, so they don't have to travel far. Not every elephant can paint, though -- maybe only 10 percent.

Are they good students?

Juthanam [a 7-year-old who lives in Lampang] and Ramona [a 5-year-old who lives in Bali] are the sweetest ones. They are smiling all of the time. They are kids. We work mostly with younger elephants; supposedly they are easier to teach. They're also smaller. When they get to my age they are gigantic, and the boys have these huge tusks. It's kind of scary. Some seem to enjoy it, but they can't paint for very long because they get bored and start looking around. Some do it quickly. Juthanam is a very careful painter; it takes her so much time to paint. She'll hold the brush in front of the canvas without touching the surface. You are waiting and thinking, "Juthanam, please get on with it." Then -- blip -- she'll make a tiny mark.

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