In Praise of “Small Art”.

A friend of mine was in Paris last week, where she went and checked out the massive Anish Kapoor sculpture, Monumenta 2011, now on exhibit at Le Grand Palais.

This got me thinking…

I like Kapoor’s work. He makes very big art.

I, on the other hand, make very small art i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards“. And the prints aren’t too large, either.

Though I like a lot of “Big Art”- Kapoor, Serra, Gormley, Smithson etc etc- I’m pretty happy I stuck with “Small Art”.

Small Art can impact another person on a meaningful level, just as powerfully as Big Art. Fifteen lines from Shelley’s Ozymandias had as much impact on me as fifteen hundred pages of Tolstoy’s War & Peace did, as much as I loved the latter.

And Small Art is A LOT less hassle to make.

And you can make more of it. More often. Without bankrupting yourself or putting your life on hold for months on end.

And perhaps more importantly, there’s the “Personal Sovereignty” angle. With Small Art, there’s no need to wait for someone else to deem it worthy beforehand, no need to wait nervously for the rich patron, the movie studio exec, or the illustrious museum director to give it the greenlight. There’s no need for the politics or the schmoozing or the bureaucracy.

Or the sleaze and corruption. The Big Art world is rife with that, as we all know full well.

With Small Art, you just go ahead and make it, and then it exists, and the rest is in the hands of the gods. Your work is already done, and you can get to bed at a decent hour. And not lose any sleep over it, either.

Hey, it worked for Joseph Cornell, Saul Steinberg and Edward Gorey… three artists who I rate WAY higher than Kapoor or Serra.

And what is true for Art is probably true for your thing, as well. Worry less about how BIG you want your business to be, instead think about how much LOVE you actually want to give out while your still have time left on this earth. “Meaning Scales”.

Exactly…