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