How to Fail as an Artist, 5

So how do you start pulling down the big bucks? How do you get everyone's attention? The answer is simple: Bigness.

If you want people to know how big you are, all you need to do is demonstrate for them. It really doesn't matter what you are into as long as you can do it bigger than anyone else. It doesn't even have to be better as long as it is inhumanly large. Even manure can become high art as long as you can make a big enough mountain of it in a really inappropriate place.

Therefore, if you paint, your paintings must all be at least 12 feet tall. This ensures that a rich person or museum has to buy it, for one. Also, exaggeration stimulates the brain. The larger you make something, the more stimulating it will be, and people will be forced to acknowledge your artistic greatness by the more primitive portions or their brains.

This also goes for sculptures without saying, but don't forget to apply it to the more popular forms of sculpture making the rounds: installation art and found object sculpture.

Many artists have already successfully applied the Bigness principle, so you'll have to work hard to catch up.

This is why inappropriateness is so important. Exaggerating size is a great first step, but since it a well-known yet never openly-talked-of secret, you also need to combine it with something inappropriate. That way you can overwhelm peoples senses and sensibilities at the same time.

Personally, I am fostering secret plans to release 30 tons of oranges set with sparklers into them Little Miami river on a highly inappropriate occasion. Wish me luck, but don't spill the beans.

(above photo: Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988)