Darren Waterston, “Filthy Lucre” (2013-14), an alternate reality installation of James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room where everything is wrecked (photo by John Tsantes, Freer & Sackler Galleries of Art)
Inspired by the Harper’s Index, Sum of the Arts is a periodic tabulation of numbers floating around the art world and beyond.
- The number of vases artist Darren Waterston painted and then bashed with a hammer for his “Filthy Lucre” installation at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art, a wrecked version of their James McNeill Whistler Peacock Room = 250
- Percentage of its GDP Italy, where bad air conditioning continues to endanger artistic masterpieces, spends on culture = 0.2 (France, in comparison, spends 1 percent)
- The weight (in tons) of the vault door that will guard the Smithsonian Institution’s new Gallery of Numismatics, opening July 1 = 1.5
- Number of figures Edward Hopper posed for in his 1942 painting “Nighthawks” = 2
- Number of prisoners who helped embroider a roughly 43-foot fiber art version of the Magna Carta’s Wikipedia page, on view at the British Library = 36
- Damaged public art cared for in the Buenos Aires sculpture “hospital” at a given time = 100
- Number of Biblical figures in the stained glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, all of which were cleaned during a seven-year restoration project = 1,130
- Number of Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv, many of which will be restored thanks to a $3.2 million grant from Germany = 4,000
- Fluid ounces of coffee poured last week at Christie’s during the course of its record-breaking auctions = 25,000
- Number of Dutch schoolchildren who visited Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and its Rembrandt “The Night Watch” last year = 400,000
