The art of the Big Society is to keep things small

A fair few are getting on with it already. My local cinema, The Lexi, a tiny jewel that seats only 80, already sends all its profits to a charity in South Africa. In Cameron's vision, similar social and artistic enterprises will build and interlock, like the cells of a honeycomb, to make one big happy British hive.

There's a lot to be said for this call to small. Some of the best experiences at Glastonbury are not in the crush at the main stages but in tiny booths housing two-man plays and the World's Dinkiest Disco. And who would have imagined that Chelsea Tractors would vanish, to be replaced by Smart cars?

The crowds at the annual Dollshouse Fair in Kensington Town Hall are displaying people's current fascination with the minute. Hundreds of displays range from hamlets of Elizabethan peasants' hovels, via Strawberry Gothic townhouses with extravagant chandeliers, to modern triplexes furnished with miniature Eames chairs and plasma screens.

Tininess has a calming effect, especially on city dwellers, whose eyes are continuously assailed by London's magnitude. Buildings that are truly vast, such as Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station, deliver a rush of sacred awe when we get up close. They speak to us of man's power and self-importance.

Smallness, by contrast, inspires sympathy and a sense of comfort. Take, for example, the work of hyperrealist Ron Mueck, whose sculptures straddle both ends of the size spectrum. The wrinkles, veins and damp hair follicles in the upscaled work, such as his gigantic newborn baby the size of a lorry, is repulsive. Yet the downscale, like the sculpture of his dead, naked father, although identical in style, is poignant and endearing.

Sadly, the easiest way for artists to get noticed is to enlarge, regardless of relevance. To this end, Nic Fiddian — Green's Godfather-style severed horse's head at Marble Arch — is the most recent example.

Meanwhile, wonderful miniaturists, too often overlooked and out of the mainstream, chase Lilliputian dreams. Alastair Mackie painstakingly constructs perfect spheres from hundreds of bleached mouse skulls — a by-product of science labs. The American Charles Ledray sews hundreds of tiny clothes to create fully realised scenes such as a gentlemen's outfitter, a charity shop and the backroom of a dry cleaners. Unpeopled but detailed with tiny plastic bags, coat hangers and irons, these tableaux, when lifesized, are run-of-the-mill, yet haunting in miniature.

Working on an even smaller scale, model-maker and photographer Slinkachu places figures going about minuscule lives of tragedy and banality on our life-sized streets. Lifeboat crew drag a drowned woman from a puddle, a man with a gun shoots a bumblebee, and a streetwalker sits provocatively on a fag butt. We care about all these little humans. We can see how frail they are — a fact so less easy to absorb when we are sharing the same dimensions. Alone, we are all small. If the Big Society can protect the small, as New Labour did the megalithic institutions, it might just work.

Liza Campbell's The Dark Boxes is at The Project Space, W2, tonight, 6pm