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Art

Sum of the Arts

Miles messages can travel in Turkey's old whistling language = 3

Allison Meier

Allison Meier

— 1 min read
Thomas Davies, "An East View of the Great Cataract of Niagara" (1762), considered the first eyewitness painting of Niagara Falls (courtesy Christie's)
Thomas Davies, “An East View of the Great Cataract of Niagara” (1762), considered the first eyewitness painting of Niagara Falls (courtesy Christie’s)

Inspired by the Harper’s Index, Sum of the Arts is a periodic tabulation of numbers floating around the art world and beyond.

  • Year in which Thomas Davies completed the first eyewitness painting of Niagara Falls, including a rainbow = 1762
  • Miles messages can travel in Turkey’s whistling language = 3
  • Number of hand-colored and hand-cut sheets in an 18th-century paper peep show = 6-8
  • Weight in pounds of each of Henry the taxidermy elephant’s tusks, which were replaced by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the 1970s with lighter fiberglass = 90
  • Percentage of light trapped by the carbon nanotubes on artist Frederik De Wilde’s black square “NanoBlck-Sqr #1” = 99.99
  • Feet of metallic fabric in Zaha Hadid’s shelter protecting pedestrians from her residential building construction on the High Line = 112
  • Number of ticking clocks Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Devon hopes to collect for a “garden of time” installation by Luke Jerram = 1,000
  • Number of years Georgia’s Crypt of Civilization, the first modern time capsule, is intended to be buried = 6,177
  • Number of plastic bottles sculpted into waves for two life-size whales made from willow in Bristol = 70,000
  • Number of segmented worm specimens in the American Museum of Natural History = 3,516,100