A British artist is offering portraits of dead spouses painted with their cremated ashes as a tribute to the dead. “Why not use a fraction of the ashes from an urn sitting on a mantelpiece for a portrait, so you can have that person physically there with you. Some people may think it is a macabre idea, but personally I do not think so, as long as the portrait is done with loving care.”
Tag: 05.22.03
Poetry Magazine Sues As $100 Million Gift Shrinks By A Third
That $100 million that Ruth Lilly left to Poetry Magazine has turned out to be about a third less than promised. And the magazine is suing the bank that was managing the money. “Court documents show that when the fund was created, Lilly stock was selling for about $75 a share. By the time the bank unloaded most of it, it was about $48 a share. According to papers filed in Probate Court in Indianapolis, attorneys for the Poetry Foundation said the $102 million ‘is a significant financial loss to Poetry and the other beneficiaries . . . and is a direct and proximate result of the bank’s wrongful conduct’.”
Great Artists On Film – Disappearing Fast
Among the most interesting records of artists of the 20th Century are films of them at work and in conversation. “In this country alone [UK], there’s probably six or seven hundreds of hours of film of artists working and talking, a wonderful learning tool for children, artists and scholars, a window on a new world for the rest of us. The tragedy is that few can see it.” And much of it is in danger of disappearing forever.
The Online Museum – One-Stop Shopping
An online archive of 100,000 images of artworks is the self-sufficient collaborative project that allows visitors to compare images side-by side. The digital archive offers “the opportunity to compare far-flung works while staying in one place and would be valuable to art teachers, students and scholars. As much as you want somebody to study your collection, those works get their meaning from context, and context is provided by other works in other collections.”
Swing Back To The Future
Take a big band sound, add banks of electronics, blend in sampled sound and a little rave culture, and you get an experiment in the old time. “By taking a dated musical style – big-band jazz – and marrying it with the kind of electronic processes usually reserved for cutting-edge dance music, Matthew Herbert has made the world’s first experimental yet traditional album. If the Institute of Contemporary Arts held a pensioners’ tea-and-modems morning, this would be its soundtrack.”
Blockbuster Breaker – Too Many People
It’s good to know that there’s an audience for art, but what about those exhibitions where so many people press in that you can’t see anything? “Big, high-profile loan shows are now so crowded it’s almost impossible to see what you’ve come to see – the art. Which raises a question: Has the blockbuster become a victim of its success? Is it now defeating the very purpose for which it was invented?”