How Small-Scale Paintings Became the Art World’s Big New Trend. By Dodie Kazanjian.
The worldwide reaction against globalism takes many forms, most of them less dramatic than Brexit. In the art world, a trend has been emerging toward personal, intimate, and sometimes (but not always) small-scale paintings. This new work has almost nothing in common with the overblown, space-filling, mixed-media installations that the critic Peter Schjeldahl described in 1999 as “festival art”—made for the commercial art fairs that have proliferated internationally for almost two decades. Museums and commercial galleries fell over themselves in the rush to follow suit, building huge new spaces to accommodate installation and performance art. Everything got bigger and more public, it seemed, and many artists were lured into producing the sort of work that would fill the new spaces and fit the appetites of ravenous new collectors. But art doesn’t move in one direction only, and a reaction was overdue…
