A Conceptual Artist Walks into a Bar...

I've been thinking about scale. When things are in their ordinary proportions, they are just that: ordinary. They are in a sense invisible to our intellects.

Changing the scale of something defamiliarizes it, concentrates it, focuses it. I think this is true whether the scale is large or small, but I'm not sure. So I imagined Christo, famous for his immense scale installations, discovering the small. I'm not sure if this is exactly as it would play out:

Christo walked into a bar and ordered a Perrier. The bartender dropped a paper cocktail umbrella in the glass as he handed it over. Everyone’s a comedian, Christo thought.

He pulled the tiny umbrella out and slid off the little pink rubber stop that kept it shut. He opened and closed it a few times—the hinge mechanism was a bit rough and it moved awkwardly at first but then more smoothly. Christo admired the balsa ribs and the cheap prettiness of the crepe paper fabric. It was a bright orange-red with surprisingly delicate ivy twisting around it, dusted with yellow blooms, rejoicing in their own flowerness. In the center of the umbrella, where the crepe paper appeared darker due to the density of the folds, Christo thought he saw the figure of a boy sitting on a sea wall sewing umbrellas. He wanted to unfold the paper to be sure, but he didn’t want to destroy the little toy. There were more, of course: a highball glass filled with them on the bar and, presumably, a whole box or boxes of them in a store room somewhere. How many of these were made, he wondered. How many in a day? In a year? Why did the artist choose to work on such a small scale? Who was the artist?

Did these umbrellas make the world more beautiful? Did they reorganize one’s perception of the world? Did the imbalance of scale and the irony of an umbrella immersed in liquid perform an important aesthetic action?

Christo wondered if anyone had ever been killed by a cocktail umbrella.

Christo started thinking small. Maybe snowglobes? A Reichstag snowglobe wrapped in a cocktail napkin.