Reviews

For most, miniature art tends only to conjure up a culture's lonely eccentricities--toy trains, dusty runes, weekend hobbyists tweezing ships into bottles. But John Mack's absorbing new book, "The Art of Small Things", argues persuasively that the miniature is society writ small: Squint hard at the world's knickknackery and find the cultures that produced it...For those determined to browse, nearly every page boasts gorgeous color plates, many of which are by necessity larger than the objects being photographed. But more than a catalog of tiny curiosities, "The Art of Small Things" is a study of how we relate to objects of all sizes, and of how the miniature strangely enables experiences of the vast or ephemeral....The pleasure of this encyclopedic book lies in the resonances Mr. Mack finds between his many historical anecdotes. Mr. Mack's roving, capacious sections are not organized within an academic thesis so much as they are arranged like a bouquet of flowers, in evocative rather than linear groupings. The book itself enacts a kind of miniaturization by surveying so many artifacts in one volume.--Jeremy Axelrod"New York Sun" (01/09/2008)

Mack draws from many cultures to meditate on the aesthetic and cultural values seemingly embodied in small works of art. His examples range from Aztec to Indian, English to Greek and cover many media. Beginning with a comparison of small works of art with the colossal, Mack discusses miniature portraits, maps, sculptures (usually of the human figure), talismans and fetishes, and the private nature of small pieces...The illustrations, frequently with details, are good; some are larger than life, providing a sense of the wonder such tiny things can evoke.--Jack Perry Brown"Library Journal" (03/01/2008)

This lavishly illustrated compendium of miniature art explores our fascination with "the outer limits of visual perception and technical precision." Mack delves into the materials and technologies involved in the production of tiny artifacts, and the daunting skills required. (The contemporary micro-miniaturist Willard Wigan, who mounts sculptures in the eye of a needle, moves his diamond-tipped tools only in the middle of a heartbeat.) The book brims with captivating detail: intricately carved Japanese netsuke, used to suspend small belongings from the belt of a kimono, were also made to feel pleasant in the hand; Elizabethan mini-portraits worn as jewelry afforded the "private pleasure" of ownership. But, Mack concludes, miniatures are finally so desirable because they resist total possession: "We are forever denied ultimate access to their interiority and the secrets they may contain."