In Praise of Tiny Things
When small space demands small art
I live out my days in a Koreatown apartment with my wife. Collectively we share somewhere in the neighborhood of 700-ish square feet including a balcony and a bathroom. While small, we pride ourselves in well adorned walls filled with art that ranges from street paintings of European scenes to nigh-on religious icons of pop culture characters, namely Sensei Miyagi of the Karate Kids. The art is accompanied by far too many books and movies on different formats, from Hi-8 tapes to LP-sized Blu Ray sleeves accompanied by a decently sized record, cassette, and CD collection.
I certainly, as my wonderful and far too tolerant wife can attest, have too much stuff. Recently, however, I came back to the enjoyment of smaller versions of all of these things. I’ve fallen in love with the small plein-air paintings of Tommy Kim including one of the palm trees near a former apartment and the miniscule paintings of Remington Robinson including this one of Telluride, CO. But paintings are only one of the mediums of art I’ve come to enjoy in recent months.
When out book shopping, likely at Burbank institution The Iliad, I search for small books, if not only in stature, then in length. In 2015, while on an academic excursion to the Harvard of the northeast (Harvard is the pithy answer here), I bought the book On Bullshit at the Harvard bookstore. On Bullshit is a wonderful collection of philosophical observations by Harry Frankfurt, a philosopher and academic whose work focuses largely on lying and, well, bullshitting in the small volume. The work is monumental, but the frame it sits within is small, which is absolutely the reason I picked up the book in the first place, accompanied by the fact that a funny curse was pressed into the tiny volume.
I have also held a large affinity for pulp printings of books throughout my adult life, owning a copy of The Great Gatsby, an abridged Moby Dick, and The Island of Dr. Moreau all in the pulp format. From pulps came a love for the mass market paperback, the medium from which I read most books now, though it has passed its period of the literary spotlight. One other particularly tiny printing that I own is a copy of Sherlock Holmes from the Little Leather Library. To have classics, new found stories, and outre nonsense litter my shelves has pressed me into reading more in the past 6 months, something I’m very glad to have started doing.
Outside of the walls of my apartment, parts of the world started to fall in love with small things too during the beginning years of the pandemic. Trading cards, at times little pieces of art — in design or illustration and occasionally both — started to trend higher and higher in price. Some even started to obsess over art so small it didn’t even physically exist (cough NFTs cough). Thankfully, pricing and general hubbub on these two things has started to fall since the general population and world governments have seemingly decided that the pandemic was over but the bump in visibility seemingly helped the folks over at Topps, chaired by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who sold their digital collectible branch in 2022 to Fanatics yet doubled down on the fungible collectible business, including the wonderfully illustrated card below.
The sports card has enjoyed a wonderful life in artfulness, with independent designers adapting classic designs into “fantasy” cards of many things, including their own favorite movies or fictional athletes or even new adaptations of the old medium of cards into designs of historical athletes. One of the most creative, break the mold style cards I’ve seen has been this “stained glass” menko card, a style of card that has been tradition in Japan for hundreds of years (menko eventually was adapted into the 90s collectible POGs). Menko was not always used for sports, however, depicting samurais and warriors and eventually showing western heroes and Japanese fictional heroes like Ultraman.
In Los Angeles, music promoter Sid the Cat has used trading cards as advertisement for concerts and shows since 2019. And as tickets have become digital and are scarcely printed save for an 8.5x11 white sheet brought from home, the physical card is a wonderful memento to say “I was there.” WHAMMY! Analog Media in Echo Park recently used a trading card as a sort of commemorative memento for a Super Mario Bros. screening they held, based on the designs originally used for the cards released at the same time as the movie.
Art, in any which way it may speak to you, is important and if you’re like me, I hope you can find it in the small things as well as the more museum-friendly pieces.