...and what are you basing that opinion on, because I lived through that period  and know the opposite to be true.  

If you asked a man on the street to name an artist, most people would just draw a blank. "Dr. Seuss" would probably be the top vote. So "nobody outside of comicdom has heard of him" isn't a helpful metric since it applies to pretty much everyone from Kirby and Eisner to today's stalwarts.

Rather than "do I know that name?" a more helpful metric would be how people respond to the art. Non-comics readers generally respond quite positively to Alex Ross art in my experience.

Actually, I think the average man or woman on the street would say "Stan Lee".  "Who's your favorite Batman artist?"  "ummm… Stan Lee?"

Still, I agree with you completely.

I love Ross' work on Marvels and I recently bought a Yellow Submarine lunchbox adorned with his art which I normally wouldn't do since I generally only buy older Beatles memorabilia, but I couldn't pass up on this because of how beautiful it looked.  And this is from someone who isn't crazy about most of Ross' superhero work (all too often, it looks like photographs of meat and potato cosplayers in spandex - seams on the costume and all), but he has some truly breathtaking work to be proud of as well.  And I say that as someone who is probably a little more territorial about my likes and dislikes than I should be - to the average person on the street who knows these characters but couldn't care less about the comics, I can't imagine someone not being impressed enough to see something like Kingdom Come (a series I dislike) to stop and take it in.

Though the 90's embraced the idea of using one bland, generic, posed cover after another, the period did have some pretty good to excellent artists: Mike Allred, Gene Ha, Norm Breyfogle, Matt Wagner, Simon Bisley, Kelly Jones, Dan Jurgens, Tom Grummett, Bruce Timm (arguably cheating on my part since he started with the Batman Animated Series, but his work did carry over to the comics), Andy Kubert, Stan Lee, Brent Anderson to name a dozen and that doesn't include artists such as Brian Bolland, Todd McFarlane, Steve Rude, Alan Davis, Mike Mignola, and so on who some might argue were more 80's artists than 90's despite their presence in the latter decade.   

I always thought it ironic that for a long time the best-known "comic book artists" to non-comics fans were probably Stan Lee and Bob Kane.

I've always liked his work when he stays in the somewhat retro uber-realistic style. He is unique at that. When he has branched out into more traditional or modern aesthetics I've found him rather unremarkable, though those are pretty few and far between.

Well, clearly if you have Ross's art on a huge public billboard then it's going to be seen by millions of people and most of them will not be comic fans. Likewise, with the odd TV spot that has covered him, millions may have tuned in on that particular day, but that's not enough to lodge him in the general public's consciousness. People have short memories. I'd also say that the vast majority of people visiting a Marvel Comics exhibition at a museum, where Ross's art happens to be displayed, are probably there because they like movies. But regardless, there's no way that the majority of visitors to the museum were particularly interested in who Alex Ross is.

But that's all kind of beside the point because the disagreement is not about whether or not regular people have seen Ross's work, or even if he's a household name; it's about tarkintino's suggestion that in the '90s his art was so popular that framed prints of his work were selling in large numbers to people who were not fans of comics or comic characters. I say that's nonsense.