Tales of the kind are familiar from the Brothers Grimm, from Andersen or Hauff: there are little or big Klaus or fat and thin Franz, or other strange couples. Most of these stories are of the do-or-die category, and end mostly, if they have not died along the way, with big Klaus and fat Franz getting the prize.
The big K, in the case of our stairwell tale embroidered on cloths of sensually Oriental allure, is, wouldn't everybody guess, the fine arts as in Kunst. The grand masters of painting, for example, create Works with that seal of quality. The small K of small art is the prerogative of the much more numerous minor masters, the poster makers, cabinet-makers and painters on glass. They are the artists for the populace, to whom the artists of the large K, as it is told occasionally happens, will not even doff their hat. But for all those cross-over artists who care (or cared) little about any such doctrine of pure categories – Kurt Schwitters, for instance, who with Kate Steinitz wrote and illustrated the storybook entitled Die Scheuche (The Scarecrow), in which K and k are impossible to tell apart at all. Just as the line separating the Domain of K and the domain of k on the map of visual art is not of any great age anyway and has been, and is, repeatedly revoked, be it by the artists of the Russian Revolution or masters at the Bauhaus or again by the video pieces of a Nam June Paik.
Question to end. How do we classify the indoor installation of which we speak –
as
Grand Art, little art, between art?
sTEPHAN vON wIESE