“Now this is a table for Shaq,” said a girl with day-glo orange hair and tattered leggings to a man in a black jacket with all sorts of extraneous zippers.

They stood under Robert Therrien’s No Title (Table and Six Chairs) and gawked at the massiveness of the work. The piece is not hard to describe: It is a plain-looking table and six chairs, just tremendous. The seat of each chair stood nearly five feet high, the back stretching to just shy of 10 feet, almost scraping the ceiling. The table — like the chairs, made of aluminum painted to look like dark wood — stood almost as tall, at about nine feet. And, at 12 feet wide and 18 1/2 feet long, its awesome dimensions tested the confines of what should have been a large gallery space at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea.

Size Does Matter, the first art exhibition curated by Shaquille O’Neal, opened Friday night to a large crowd that appeared to be some mix of New York aesthetes, curious hipsters and intrigued basketball fans. It was difficult to tell — in Manhattan, one person could easily be all three — and there was no dominant draw among the few people I asked. Some came because it was Shaq’s art show, for sure. Others came to see the works on display from high-profile artists like Jeff Koons and Ron Mueck. One noted “all the buzz” around the show.

Hype breeds hype and crowds attract crowds. Shaq curated an art exhibit and landed some big-name works, and a bunch of people showed up. No surprises there, I guess.

Though Shaq himself is colossal, the exhibition was more than just impressively huge things. There were tiny things too — like Willard Wigan’s (literally) microscopic sculptures of the Obama family and Shaq inside the eyes of needles, and Jim Torok’s Self Portrait with Yellow Sunglasses.

More than anything, though, the show was about jarring proportions. Richard Dupont’s Untitled (Terminal Stage), which cannot really be adequately represented by a photograph, featured three sculptures, modeled after the artist, in cast polyurethane resin, set up a few feet apart from one another in a triangle.

Though from some angles, the sculptures might look identical — and in realistic human scale — each was skewed in some unique way so that, from a certain perspective, it looked like it was being viewed through a funhouse mirror or, as one onlooker said, “through someone else’s glasses.”

It was fascinating to behold, and to feel my eyes try to adjust and process information that clearly did not connect with my brain’s long-conditioned notion of what humans and sculptures of humans should be shaped like.

And it was even more fascinating, of course, to watch other people go through the same process.

Evan Penny’s amazing Stretch #2, while not as dizzying, inspired a similar reaction. A nine-foot tall silicon sculpture of a stretched head, the work impressed crowds and baffled amateur photographers.

There are traces of Shaq’s persona throughout the exhibit, beyond just the life-size portrait of a smiling Shaq by Peter Max that graces the gallery’s reading room.

A photograph from Paul Pfeiffer’s basketball series, Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, is on display, as is a reminder of one of Shaq’s previous forays off the basketball court: his hip-hop career.  Kehinde Wiley’s portrait, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, hangs directly across from Max’s piece.

Still, even with two floors packed with cool pieces to look at, I kept going back to Therrien’s table.

It’s tough to say, with a work like that, who should get credit for the way it’s displayed, and whether it’s even reasonable to assess a piece based partly on the room that contains it. The Internet shows me that the same work has previously been shown in much bigger rooms, and even outdoors.

But someone — presumably Shaq himself — chose to show Therrien’s piece in a Manhattan space probably not really suitable for works of its scale. And someone set it up in that particular room at the FLAG Art Foundation, alone, filling every last bit of it, each chair sitting mere inches from the wall. At some step along the line, someone — or some collection of someones — made conscious choices to cram that table and those chairs in that space, and so I think it’s reasonable to assess its effect as displayed, even if its not necessarily the original one Therrien intended.

Because that table moved me in a way I did not honestly expect to be moved by Shaq’s art exhibition. Looking up at the tremendous table jammed into the room, and seeing all the people coming in and staring and laughing and taking pictures with it, it made me feel Shaq somehow, for a fleeting second, and it was so damn sad that I had to brace myself against the wall.

How uncomfortable must it be, sometimes, to be that big? How claustrophobic? Our world is not built for 7’1″, 350 pound men, just as that room was not built for an 18 1/2 foot-long table. What desk did Shaq sit at in middle school?

The Shaq we know, his public persona, is playful, and the work is a playful piece, too — make no mistake. It’s a giant dinner table, after all. It’s fun. But something about all the people enjoying it, reveling in its gentle giantism, made me wonder if Shaq ever wants to hide. You can’t hope to blend in when you’re 7’1″ and 350 pounds. Maybe on the court in the NBA, but never once the game is over.

And when I thought about it that way, it made perfect sense that Shaq’s art exhibition would not be a mere celebration of big things, but a more complex exploration of scale and perception. Shaq’s sheer size is a big part — maybe the biggest part, no pun intended — of what made him a great basketball player and of what makes him so entertaining a character. But I would venture to guess it has also complicated his life in ways I cannot entirely comprehend.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a big table.

It all made me remember this tweet from the Big Aristotle himself, though:

If u feel alone and by yourself, look in the mirror, and wow, there’s two of you. Be who you are. Who are you. I am me. Ugly, lol. Shaq

Smile, Shaq. You’re money.

Seriously, the iPhone pictures here don’t do these works justice. If you’re in New York, go see the show. It’s at 545 W. 25th St, between 10th and 11th, it’s free, and it’s open Wednesday-Saturday from 12-5 p.m.

I’ve always been interested in stadium architecture. I like sports and my father is an architect, so I guess it’s a natural fit.

I wrote my final grad school paper on the Bird’s Nest stadium that was, at the time, under construction for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I touched on some of the themes of that essay in this column.

In this country, the term “stadium architecture” is often something of an oxymoron. Jeffrey Loria, for better or worse, is out to change that:

Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria’s vision has always been to turn the franchise’s new ballpark into a work of art.

OK, so that’s a bit pretentious. “I’m going to make a big awesome new stadium, and it’s going to be ART, dammit!” But you’ve got to respect the guy for trying to shake things up a bit in the stadium-design paradigm. I thought the Rays’ new stadium would be the first place to do that, but then the bottom fell out of the project.

Anyway, the Marlins got the Miami Art in Public Places Trust to commission a few local and international artists for installations at the new place, and at least a couple of them look to be pretty awesome. Ron Grooms’ home-run celebration feature looks a bit hokey, for sure, but it’s colorful and fan-friendly and a very Miami-appropriate take on the Shea Stadium apple.

What I love, though, is the proposed project by Daniel Arsham and Snarkitecture to commemorate the old Orange Bowl, which was demolished in 2008 to make room for the stadium. The plan is to create concrete replicas of the letters from the Orange Bowl’s original sign and scatter them around the stadium’s entrance plaza.

That’s sweet. The letters can serve as seating or identifiable meeting places for fans outside of the ballpark, and at the same time work as a memorial to a part of the city’s sports history. They’ll look a bit random, for sure, and I can imagine a bunch of incredulous Tweets from beat writers seeing the place for the first time, but they’re clearly fun.

There’s a lot about the new stadium and its design that’s a bit risky, and obviously it’s too soon to say if or how it will all look and work, but good for the Marlins for attempting something different.

Is there a more awesome human than Shaquille O’Neal?

For years I’ve maintained that everything Shaq does is art, and now he’s taking it up a notch:

Shaquille O’Neal is curating an art exhibit set to start on Feb. 19 at the FLAG Art space in Chelsea.

Needless to say, I will do everything in my power to attend the opening and report back here.

The subject of the exhibit is right in Shaq’s giant wheelhouse. It’s called “Size DOES Matter,” and will “explore the various ways that scale affects the perception of contemporary art.”

In other words: Big stuff.

Clearly, scale is an important aspect of my Awesomeist movement, and obviously Shaq recognizes that. And since Shaq is hand-selecting or commissioning every piece of art to be displayed, it’s bound to be the most comprehensive collection of Awesomeism yet assembled.

The list of artists includes Ron Mueck, a hyperrealist sculptor whose work I fell in love with when he had an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, back when I lived around the corner from it. His pieces are amazingly lifelike in every way except their ridiculous size, making them, in that sense, a lot like Shaquille O’Neal.

Jeff Koons is also on the list. Koons also sculpts some vaguely awesome work, but he ruins it when he opens his mouth and starts talking about the meaning. That contradicts one of the fundamentals of Awesomeism: That which is Awesome never needs an explanation.

Little-known fact: I did my master’s studies in Arts and Humanities, an interdisciplinary arts program I began immediately after giving up my dream of a career in sports journalism. I had no solid plan in mind for turning it into an actual job, but it seemed like — and was — a damn fine excuse to move out of my parents’ house, meet interesting people, and learn a whole lot about a bunch of different stuff I found interesting.

It was through my coursework there that I developed my still-unfinished plan for Dawn of the Awesome, the art manifesto aimed to foster appreciation for the spectacular and unsubtle, one I detailed in greater length in July.

Anyway, to better utilize my long-dormant arts background and to forward awareness of my art movement, Awesomeism, I’m starting a new non-sports feature on this blog in the vain of From the Wikipedia and Culture Jammin’: Art Attack.

The debut Art Attack installment: The Berg Manifesto

The Berg manifesto, amazingly, was not written by me. In fact, unbelievably, it’s not even about me. It’s about The Berg, a proposed 1,000-meter tall manmade mountain for Berlin, Germany by architect Jakob Tigges.

The Berg would stand about 1,000 feet taller than any other currently extant man-made structure, a literal mountain of unapologetic Awesomeness right in the heart of Berlin.

Oh, and it’d be great for skiing, apparently. And a safe haven for mountain goats, too.

Needless to say, this has to get done. Naysayers in the Popular Science comments section say things like, “oh, it’ll affect the weather.” Damn right it’ll affect the weather! It’s a f@#$ing mountain! You think people haven’t been living beside huge awesome mountains since the dawn of civilization? Think of the goats, guy!

A bunch of others bring up more practical applications for the money that would need to finance the Berg, and one even says, “Just because we can do something, does not mean that we should.”

What? No! That’s exactly why we should do something. Do you even understand the fundamental tenets of Awesomeism? Sometimes tremendous and awesome things don’t need a reason. That’s the whole point.

This absolutely needs to happen. It’d be, at the very least, the most certain way the city of Berlin could earn my tourist dollar, not to mention my utmost respect.

Still, because people somehow doubt that this would be a good idea, proponents of the mountain have penned The Berg Manifesto. And to make it even more awesome, it’s all loaded up with Schadenfreude:

Hamburg, as stiff as fat, turns green with envy, rich and once proud Munich starts to feel ashamed of its distant Alp-panorama and planners of the Middle-East, experienced in taking the spell off any kind of architectural utopia immediately design authentic copies of the iconic Berlin-Mountain.

Suck it down, Hamburg! You too, Munich! Yield to our ridiculous homemade mountain! Do you have a giant mountain in the middle of your city? No, I didn’t think so. And yeah, Dubai, we et that you’ve got some pretty awesome buildings, but do you have any giant mountains? Bow down to our architectural utopia.