Go to any show of contemporary work and you will find huge canvases. These are not large because they need to be, in the sense that John Martin’s subjects demand huge scale, or in the sense that Pollock’s work needs to expand outside the human optical field of vision. Instead they are large simply because large is used as a substitute for significance, or rather they are thought to be made Significant purely by virtue of their size. My personal preference is for the opposite – the small, even tiny image presented almost as a jewel with the eye drawn in by a generous relatively neutral surround.
I’m not alone in my view of these huge works though. Consider this by Andrew Graham-Dixon in his book on Howard">Howard Hodgkin.
Many of [Hodgkin’s] pictures offer an implicit rebuke to the habitual large scale, the creeping gigantism that has become the lingua franca of international contemporary art, and to spend time with them is to realize just how many other modern painters have misunderstood scale, have failed to realize that to work big all the rime is like talking forever with your voice raise. After a while what was intended as emphasis turns into its opposite, a perpetual dull bombast. Large art often says less about its overt subject matter than it does about the anxiety, ambition and insecurity of its maker. Conversely, small art, art that makes few claims to Consequence or Importance or Relevance (that dangerous trinity of contemporary art criticism), often seems freer to be eloquent, and to be moving.
Of course it isn’t just the artists. The commodification of art, the idea that only the works which get megabucks at auction are Important also plays a part since the the commodity brokers trading in this market want to be seen to be getting such sums too as a part of the hype and its easier to do this for a huge canvas than a small one, even if the only place to hold such large pieces is an anonymous storage facility somewhere in North London (or New York, or Tokyo or Los Angeles) and they are never brought out to be viewed except when they are sold on at the next big gig auction.
