1 Author names Rebecca Farley and Venda Louise Pollock rebecca.farley@newcastle.ac.uk venda.pollock@newcastle.ac.uk School of Arts and Cultures, Armstrong Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. TITLE Size Isn’t Everything: The Failure of BIG Public Art ABSTRACT In 2023 Newcastle upon Tyne is promised the arrival of the Geordie Giant a 12m (39ft) high sculpture in human form which will act as an emblem of the city’s turn to the experience economy. It is part of Giants on the Quayside, a proposed £100m leisure and entertainment complex that will include the Whey Aye Ferris wheel, billed as being, crucially, 5m (16ft) taller than the London Eye. This narrative of Giant-ism is surprising, coming after a decade of failures of, what we term here, ‘BIG’ public art—i.e. public art that is big in size, big in ambition, and big in terms of the stature of the artist involved. Taking Channel 4 Television’s Big Art Project initiative and a portfolio of unrealised artworks (including Mark Wallinger’s still absent White Horse of Ebbsfleet, and Charles Jencks and Cecil Balmond’s proposed Star of Caledonia) as key examples, this article revisits the era of BIG public art in post-industrial Britain. Drawing on recent writing on architecture and urban regeneration, and interviews with project