Believe it or not, some art lovers hold this to be a stupid question.
But not I. So consider a simple model and imagine the rest. You are an artist and you have better and worse ideas, as defined by either marketplace success or critical acclaim (or both). You can, to some degree, allocate your ideas across different size canvases. Some ideas only work well in the small, and some ideas only work well in the large, but still there is some flexibility. You are most likely to allocate your best ideas to the most saleable medium. And since larger pictures usually sell for more than smaller ones, why not put your better ideas into the larger pictures? You won’t waste a tremendous idea on a mere snippet of work, except perhaps as a practice or draft. The marginal revenue product (or "marginal critical acclaim product") will be higher for the bigger pictures. Of course we assume that the substitution effect outweighs the income effect. (Micro question: what assumptions about costs do we need? Does it suffice to assume that, given the cost of producing ideas, we can produce larger paintings at less than proportional cost? If you are Ellsworth Kelly, doubling the canvas size just isn’t that big a deal…)
There are caveats. If the picture is too large, and cannot hang above a sofa, perhaps it sells for less. So throw out monotonicity. You will put your best ideas into the most saleable medium, which does not always mean "bigger."
Longer songs are not better than shorter songs. I’ve never paid attention to all of "Nantucket Sleigh Ride." But the best songs will be close to around three minutes long, the dominant size or "medium" for hit songs. Songwriters and composers won’t put their best ideas into snippets. The best movies will be around two hours long, rather than a skit. Some artists will break these patterns for personal reasons; Peter Jackson wanted a three-hour King Kong for the (ha-ha) sake of the story. This may be a case of the income effect weighing in and financing self-indulgence.
Books should be better than short stories. Again, put your better ideas into the better-paying medium. Of course if customers use length as a signal of quality, these tendencies will be further strengthened. Intermediaries, such as networks, record companies, and your agent, will help enforce the constraints.
And how long are the best blog posts? The best comments to your wife? The best flirtations? The best comments on blog posts?
Thanks to Robin Hanson and Ilia Rainer for useful discussions of this point, and to Ilia for the question.
There is a signaling effect in making a long movie as well. Of course, this only works as long as it isn’t too easy to fake. Generally studios only allow movies to run over three hours if the film or its director are considered “important”.
Why are canvas always quare or rectangular?
The practical issue is that galleries find
smaller works easier to sell
due to lower prices, ease of accommodation
in the home etc, so artists have to produce them. That larger works
cost more suggests most
people think them “better.”
But smaller works may be better the way
appetizers are often the best dishes in a restaurant. As with
short stories vs novels this may simply get
us into the lyric/epic debate. The real
question, leaving aside Baumol’s disease, is
why is art so expensive? There’s a huge supply and a huge
demand, but the two sides are too far
apart on price. I’ve never seen a good explanation.
One thing I’ve seen several writers (Isaac Asimov is one that comes to mind0 comment on is that the shorter a piece is, the harder it is to write. On the other hand, it’s presumably easier to place a short story in a magazine than to get a book contract (although that depends on the strength of the magazine market).
If you think that artists choose the size of their canvas based on saleability then you likely: (1) have a bunch of landscape paintings in your home; (2) think Normal Rockwell was an artist; and (3) “don’t get” Duchamp.
All are of course valid points of view. But any decent post-modernist would choose the best size to express their ideas. Focusing on a lesser-idea just because it would be on a bigger canvas is more landscape-style thinking than art-school-trained kind of thinking.
I think there are a lot of competitive pressures felt by galleries that at least partially drive this. A show just has more good old-fashinged curb appeal if the first thing you see when you walk in the door are big bold pieces on the wall. On the other hand there are enough tiny masterpieces out there (think Bruegel or Chardin) to disprove the bigger-is-better mindset.
I’m always delighted to sell a big painting, but the reality is that at this point in my career, about 90% of what I sell are paintings of 8×10 inches and smaller, which I intentionally price to be very approachable. Of course, I’m delighted to sell those too.
Wow, I never knew that anyone believed in decent post-modernists, or that art school was likely to make a person better at judging or creating art.
I also didn’t expect to hear Tyler talking about “self-indulgence”. Isn’t the standard economical assumption that while Peter Jackson may have been reducing the profitability of his movie by making it so long, the reduced profit (and hence income) was less valuable to him than the benefit he derived from making the movie longer than customers thought optimal?
This reminds me of a serious concern I have about the claim that tax cuts increase the encentives of the wealthy to create. That claim is only valid so long as tax cuts don’t enable the wealthy to reach a part of their utility curve where increased after-tax wages = more consumption of leisure. Seinfeld, Gary Lawrson, and Bill Watterson come to mind as examples of artists who explicitly stopped producing a product that the market valued highly because they had enough money that they couldn’t be further motivated by money. Michael Eisner is arguably another example. He kept coming back, but once he was wealthy enough he couldn’t be bothered to care enough to do a good job, so he saved Disney and then let it die.
Hmm. There might be another few elements to be taken into account too.
* Artists’ capacities. Books and movies are — like operas — extremely demanding. Scale-wise, they’re at the outer limits of what creative people can manage. Which may mean that 1) it’s common for creative people to run out of energy and inspiration when doing an ultra-big project, and 2) maybe the sheer scale (of a novel, big painting, movie) tends to make creative puff up in ways that are artistically unfortunate. Maybe they tend to get self-important when facing such challenges, or maybe they get depressed. Neither one is, generally, a good thing where the quality of the end product is concerned. And all of which may mean that — despite the kind of zing that commercial demands and pressures can give a work –movies, novels, operas, and great big paintings tend to flop more often than more modestly-scaled works do. People just run out of energy, or find themselves unable to keep the project under artistic management.
* Artists’ preferences. A lot of novels, for instance, are really story ideas that have been blown up beyond what they deserve or need to be because the market likes and demands novel-length fiction more than story-length fiction. (It’s pretty widely-acknowledged in the bookbiz that many novels are padded-out stories. Sad fact of life: Americans like fat books, but with a lot of white space and short chapters. They want it easy, but they want it big. Comparisons to convenience foods are expected here …) I know a fair number of fiction writers, and many of them would agree that most fiction ideas play themselves out most naturally at somewhere between 20 and 120 pages in length. That’s a human kind of scale. Yet it’s next to impossible to sell such creations. So, 90% of the time, a lot of stretching and bulking goes on.
* In the case of novels, one thing more people could give a little more thought to is how arbitrary the book-length thing is. A book is just a container for content, after all. Why should a piece of fiction just happen to fill such a thing up? It’s funny: a matter of physical convenience has kinda defined an art form. Books often happen to be around 300 pages long — how … well, coincidental that novels do too! But is 300 pages really what you want from fiction? Or what the writer would really like to write?
I dunno. In any case, isn’t it generally better that an art-idea be given its optimum expression and not any other, whatever that happens to mean scale-wise in the specific case?
Regarding choice of medium, if the most popular medium began to be populated by a preponderance of ‘also-rans’ wouldn’t better artists seek a more obscure medium to separate themselves from the pack, i.e. “The Gates” in Central Park, and countless indie rock acts whose songs often meander for minutes before coming to an end (Broken Social Scene and Animal Collective come to mind)often to critical if not commercial success?
Continuing the example of the 78 rpm record above, the “optimal” length of songs/movies is surely artificial. The 3 minute song is an artifact of LP technology as well as radio preference, and the 2 hour movie is based on theatre wishes to show 3 shows during a given evening. In other creative works without such historical paths, we see no such trend. Popular books range from Twain’s 200 to Tolstoy’s 1000, videogames range in length from 5 hours to 100 hours to “infinite” (i.e., Tetris). I see no reason to believe that 3 minutes is a more aesthetically pleasing song length.
Fans of the group Yes would beg to differ in the “shorter is better” song department! Some of the groups best works are 10-20 minutes long.
I think that “long” literature and movies have the potential to be “better” than “shorter” works, because longer works allow the author/producer to draw the consumer deeper into the story. Lord of the Rings is the best example that I can think of.
That being said, a great short story is priceless.
In terms of stories, a great number of “long” works are actually several short works stuck together. The first example I can think of is “Pulp Fiction”, which is a couple of short stories, in which the main characters from one story are the bit characters in the other.
This is quite common, and a reasonable solution to fitting short stories to the novel or movie format without excessive padding.
Interesting topic.
As someone who paints (sort of), bigger tends to be better in my experience. Most of my art work is figurative, and I find I can experience dimension better … finesse details more precisely … create “atmosphere” more easily when I work larger.
Some of the stuff I do has a symbolic aspect to it. In the case of symbols or similar motifs, smaller scale surfaces work well.
So for me it depends pretty much on the subject matter.
My daughter is a much better painter than I am, and came through a fine arts program. She is always saying she wants to “go bigger” and seems to hanker after the freedom that comes with the larger canvas.
As far as appreciation goes, yes I prefer large and spectacular works. I remember going to an exhibition in Belfast, N. Ireland that featured the figuarative paintings of Jack B. Yeats ( brother of the poet W.B.Yeats).
Some of his canvases were huge and most presented a drama, painted in an oddly sketchy style. It was a bit like going to the theater.
A personal favorite of mine is Gustav Klimt, and some of his large works are really impressive.
It can be odd going from an art book with illustrations, to seeing the real McCoy in the gallery. I was hugely impressed at one time with illustrations of certain paintings by Pablo Picasso. However when I saw some of these in a gallery I was disappointed. Most were smaller than I imagined, and lacked the impact I assumed they would possess.
Books: In science fiction, anyway, there is an old trend of expanding award-winning short works to make novels. And in every case where I’ve read both, the short version was clearly better. (Note that’s expanding one story rather than combining several shorter stories to reach book length, which is a strategy which frequently works very well.)
Songs: I’m surprised but after poking around my MP3 collection, it looks like the ideal length for a song for me is somewhere in the 3:40-4:00 range. I do have quite a few that are longer — lately I’ve been listening a lot to a new 15 minute long musical version of the poem Tam O Shanter — but I’ve got to admit that in my heart of hearts, the ones over 5 minutes last longer than I’d prefer. (I note that Ian Anderson has written some real gems that come in around the 1:30-2:00 mark.)
None of this applies to tunes or other instrumental works, though!
Actually, I probably couldn’t, but somebody could and I ‘m surprised nobody has. Thanks for the info.
Longer songs are not better than shorter?
Longer Movies are not better that shorter?
I completely disagree. Most of my favorite modern songs and movies are longer than the norm for the art form. It seems like if the piece is good and the creators know it’s good, then they don’t have to worry about fitting it into the norm because it will stand on its own.
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