Would you like to wake from dreams with a reminder of your inevitable eternal sleep? An alarm clock currently on view at the British Library in London, which is part of the Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination exhibition, is a curious continuation of the memento mori tradition.
death
Posted inArt
Saving the Environment One Death at a Time
In the United States, funerals often seem to be at war with death’s decay. Rather than let our bodies decompose into the soil, we embalm and coat them in makeup, seal them in wood and metal caskets, lower them into waterproof vaults.
Posted inIn Brief
A New Service Promises an Artistic Afterlife
In search of the next Vivian Maier? Comb through garage sales no further.
Posted inArt
Designing Spaces for a Better Death
As life spans extend and the window of time in which we experience death widens — hospital visits, hospice care, nursing homes, funeral homes — some architects are considering how we can better design for this final chapter.
Posted inNews
Anarchy in the UK Art Market
All is not well in Albion, where the business of art is apparently getting ever more lugubrious.
Posted inBooks
Angels and the Dead: Reviving Occult Manuals
It seems like every few decades there is a mainstream revival for the occult and esoteric. Not that it ever fades away, but there is a periodic surge in fascination with the unknowable, the rites, rituals, and art that make up its history.
Posted inArt
Radically Rethinking the Architecture of Death
What happens when you die? Well, in a literal way, what happens to everyone else. You’re likely to have a traditional, costly, funeral, and then a small slot of land in a quiet sprawl of cemetery will be yours.
Posted inNews
Can a Town Be a Museum? The Battle Over Jim Thorpe’s Bones
Jim Thorpe was arguably the greatest athlete of all time, yet the sports legend has mostly been in the news of late due to his remains, which were controversially buried in a town he never visited.
Posted inOpinion
The Kitsch of Death, or Andy Warhol’s Birthday Livestream
Eighty-five years ago today, Andrej Varhola, Jr., was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He would go on to become the famous Andy Warhol, whose artwork decorates the walls of museums and, most recently, Perrier bottles. In honor of that birthday, the Andy Warhol Museum has set up a live webcam feed of his grave, starting today.
Posted inArt
Redesigning Death
For the amount of time that people have been dying, which is quite long really, our designs for death haven’t changed as much as our designs for everything else.
Posted inArt
Death, Darkness, Alchemy, and Rebirth
I’ve always been attracted to the macabre in art and literature. I have a vivid memory of pronouncing Edgar Allen Poe my favorite author we had read that year in 7th grade; most of my classmates preferred Harper Lee or Mark Twain. While walking through the group exhibition A Wake: Still Lives and Moving Images at the Dumbo Arts Center, which combines video, cinema, and photography to explore the theme of death, I had a similar experience to when I first read Poe.