After incarnating the “boom object” of the industrialized nations in the 1950s and 1960s, unaided, the compact object is nowadays regarded at once as cute (minority, superfluous) and disquieting (metaphysical, critical, and mutinous). We hate to love it and love to hate it. The contemporary mini has sex appeal. Even when multiplied, it remains one-off.

This mini, compact catalogue, written in both French and English and available in six different colors, accompanies the exhibition “BigMinis,” at CAPC museum of contemporary art of Bordeaux. Both explore the fascination that things “scaled down” wield these days, afflicted by the crisis as we all are. If it is possible to see in the mini a harbinger of crisis, as well as a reflection and a critical consequence of this latter, we must also not overlook the fact that it usually represents an unexpected and off-kilter response to the recession. Because a reduction in size conveys the idea of a reduction in cost, space, and time, it likens the production of the compact to an intelligent, reactive production, adapted to its economic and cultural context. A control-production.

The exhibition “BigMinis” is a dialectical show which brings together 182 works by seventy-two contemporary artists, enhanced by several emblematic historical works all coming from French and foreign public collections, private foundations, private collections, galleries, and artists. It has come into being in the current economic climate, with the aim of questioning the fascinating attraction with what we might call “fetishes of crisis.”