Traditionally, artists made small, lovely
things. They laboured to render a few square
inches of canvas utterly perfect or to chisel
a single bit of stone into its most expressive
form.
Traditionally the most common size
for art was between three and six feet across.
And while artists were articulating their
visions across such expanses, the large scale
projects were given over wholesale to governments
and private developers – who generally operated
with much lower ambitions. Governments and
the free market made big ugly things rather
often. A145-00196 We’re so familiar with
this divergence that we tend not to think
about it at all. We regard this polarisation
as if it was an inevitable fact of nature,
rather than what it really is – a cultural
failing.
It is because of this failing that the artists
Christo and Jeanne-Claude (collectively known
as Christo) stand out as quite so important.
Christo points the way to a new kind of art
and a new kind of public life. Christo have
been the artists most ambitious about challenging
the idea that artists should work on a tiny
easel – and keenest to produce work on a
vast industrial scale. Other artists have
experimented more widely and addressed us
more intimately. What’s distinctive and
important about Christo is that they want
to make art that can fill the sort of expanses
previously associated with airports, motorways,
supermarkets, light industry zones, marshalling
yards, factories and technology parks. Christo
and Jeanne-Claude started exploring the effect
of having an impact on quite big things, around
1968, when they draped a medieval Italian
tower.
The idea was pushed much further when they
wrapped a whole bit of coastline in Australia.
image12 Next they slung an enormous orange
curtain across a valley in Colorado. image01
Then they got around to surrounding some islands
off the coast of Florida with 6.5 million
square feet of floating
pink fabric.
They then wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris. 
 And in 1991, in a simultaneously project,
installed thousands of umbrellas for forty
miles along two valleys, one in the US and
one in Japan.
In 1995, they carried out a monumental
project in Berlin. They veiled the German
Reichstag, which was the traditional seat
of national authority and also the focus on
intensely painful memories because of its
association with the rise of the Nazi party.
And then they spectacularly unwrapped it in
an act of national renewal. Christo has gone
far beyond even traditional architecture,
the standard next step up from art: they occupy
a space normally occupied by city planners
or civil engineers constructing a container
port or landscape architects laying out parkland
around a town. Christo can look very innovative,
but in a way their conception of art is deeply
traditional. What they mean by art is making
beautiful things. They might be wrapping things
or surrounding them, or marking routes with
flags and banners, but what guides them is
the search to make the world more beautiful.
Only not just a little bit at a time. The
scale of their efforts to make the world beautiful
has been stupendous – and inspiring.
Perhaps the biggest thing Christo has done,
however, is to indicate a direction of travel,
which doesn’t stop with the great things
they themselves happen to have done. One key
move is not to stop with imagining something
wonderful but to work out how to make the
imagined thing come real. Rather than picture
a revitalised central Park, they revitalised
it. Rather than imagine Germany renewing its
feelings about its historic centre of government,
they made it happen. The ideal task of the
artist isn’t just to dream of a better world,
or complain about current failures (though
both are honourable); rather it is to actually
make the world finer and more elegant.
The primary identity of Christo is an artist.
But to operate realistically on a large scale,
they needed to deploy many of the skills traditionally
associated with business and which we think
of as the domain of the entrepreneur.
Christo had to negotiate with city councils
and governments; they had to draw up business
plans, arrange large scale finance, employ
the talents and time of hundreds even thousands
of people and all
the while, they held on to the high ambitions
associated with being an artist.
The way they made money was
fascinating: they financed a project by selling
the plans and drawings for it. It was like
Plato financing a new state by selling copies
of the Republic (except, unlike Plato, Christo
made their utopia happen).
Christo is showing us that ideally artists should
absorb the best qualities of business. Rather
than seeing such qualities as opposed to what
they stand for artists, following Christo’s
lead, should see these as great enabling capacities,
which help them fulfil their beautifying mission
to the world. In the future, an artist might
spend as much time being trained by the Wharton
School of Business or INSEAD as by the Royal
College of Art. Christo has never got to build
an airport or a supermarket or lay out a new
city – but the ideal next version of them
will.
Our book what is culture for?  Helps us find compassion, hope and perspective in the arts
