Although Leonardo da Vinci died almost half a millennium ago, he has had a great year. The success of his show at the National Gallery in London has been sensational.
Tickets, which the museum sells at 16 pounds ($25), had been changing hands on Internet sites for as much as 400 pounds (until the museum declared the resold versions invalid). The line for admission each day is 3 hours long. Who would have imagined that an old master could generate this level of excitement? Or that the staid National Gallery would outshine Tate and the whole galaxy of contemporary art in terms of glitz?
Things also have looked up for Oscar Wilde and Jacob Epstein. Wilde’s tomb, carved by Epstein and sited in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, Paris, has just been cleaned of graffiti. Much of this took the form of lipstick left by admirers kissing the monument.Such adulation, even if damaging on conservation grounds, was a dramatic turnaround in itself. Wilde (1854-1900) died in exile, poverty stricken and reviled after serving a prison sentence for homosexual acts. The author’s tomb, designed by the sculptor Epstein, features an angel in quasi-Assyrian style.
This monument caused consternation when it arrived in Paris in 1912 on account of the prominence of the angel’s testicles. The French authorities had the sculpture covered with a tarpaulin until World War I; in 1961, these pendulous pieces of stone were hacked off the tomb.
Missing Parts
According to one story, the vandals were two outraged British ladies and the fragments were subsequently used by the custodian as paperweights. Perhaps now there should be a concerted search for these missing angelic body parts so that poor Oscar can rest completely in peace.
The asymmetrical conflict between the artist Ai Weiwei and the Chinese government is continuing, and it’s still too early to call the winner. It has been far from fun for Ai himself. His 81-day detention earlier in the year caused a global furor. Subsequently, he has been pursued for “economic crimes.”
On Nov. 18, one of his assistants was interrogated about a (fairly demure) photograph he had taken of Ai, nude, with four naked women (titled “One Tiger, Eight Breasts”). The authorities suggested that this was pornography. In response, Ai’s supporters rapidly uploaded naked photographs of themselves on a site in a protest, insisting that nudity is not pornography.
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