Sum of the Arts

Man Ray, “Seguidilla” (1919), airbrushed gouache, pen & ink, pencil, and colored pencil on paperboard (via Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Wikimedia)

Sum of the Arts is a periodic tabulation of numbers floating around the art world and beyond.

• Number of works by Man Ray stored in a Long Island auto body shop managed by his nephews = 4,500
• Number of times a 1908 Igor Stravinsky dirge was performed before its rediscovery this year at the St. Petersburg Conservatory = 1
• Number of minutes you would save if one 17-mile stretch of London’s Tube (aka subway) were replaced with moving sidewalks instead of trains = 5
• Millimeters in diameter of a videoscope the Getty Museum used to look inside a 17th-century French bronze sculpture = 6
• Number of months a Pennsylvania priest spent building a Lego model of St. Peter’s Basilica, which is currently on view at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in honor of the Papal visit = 10
• Length of text and drawings (in feet) on the recently identified oldest and longest ancient Egyptian manuscript = 16.4
• Number of lost baseball hats found while deinstalling the Snarkitecture-designed ball pit at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC = 32
• Number of galleries in the Lower East Side Business Improvement District, compared to 63 in 2010 = 124
• Number of carats the supposedly cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond started at before some shoddy gem cutting = 800
• Estimated number of rabbits killed to bind the 1946 first edition of Margaret Wise Brown’s children’s book, Little Fur Family, in fur = 15,000