James Metcalf on the fictionality of the latest archaeological page-turners
Stephen Puddicombe looks at the unusual appeal of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Ciaran Rafferty investigates the science of book classification
We’ve got marvellous mummies, root vegetables, and admirers going Wilde for all you hungry culture vultures this week.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has opened six new galleries on the subject of ancient Egypt and Nubia. Dusting off objects in storage since the Second World War, it features world-renowned collections from over five thousand years. The galleries give visitors the chance to get under the skin of this fascinating ancient culture, and to get close to its gripping beauty. Surviving fragments and relics still glimmer transfixingly with gold and colour, whilst mummies continue to withhold the bodies of humans that lived and died millennia ago.
One of its stars is a mummified priest from a temple in Thebes named Djeddjehutyiufankh – or Jed, for short. The galleries also reunite a husband and wife. The statue of the pharaoh Akhenated, and the beautiful image of his wife, Nefertiti, had been kept apart since the 1800s. And alongside this history is the installation Unwrapped: The Story of a Child. Contemporary artist Angela Palmer re-tells the history of a single individual - a boy who died almost 2,000 years ago from pneumonia, aged just two years old. Four years of work has combined science, art and archaeology, to produce a three-dimensional work of his small body.
Visitors to the monument of Oscar Wilde have been leaving rather literal marks of their affection. Paying affectionate homage to the Irish writer, people have been puckering up to the tomb since the late 1990s. The memorial to Wilde in the Père Lachaise cemetery, situated within the Paris in which he died, is covered in lipstick kisses. But this comes at a cost. Not only do those caught stealing a kiss risk a hefty fine - £7,700 – but they are causing irreparable damage to the mausoleum. A newly installed glass barrier will now hold back the hordes when unveiled on Wednesday, on the anniversary of Wilde’s death.
The wayward sibling of its older, better-known relation The Turner Prize, The Turnip Prize has now released its 2011 shortlist. The award presents itself as ‘the antidote’ to the art contest which ‘annually dazzles the public of the World with a dire tribe of pseudo artistic litter.’ Marks are awarded for lack of effort, and for the use of dreadful puns. Past winners include ‘Nothing’ - a piece of art which, reliably, actually was nothing - and one large and three small chillies on a plate, entitled ‘Chilli ‘n’ minors.’ Groan.
Battling it out this year are CheeseE (a slice of cheese carved in the shape of that letter), an action man with a well-placed postage stamp, and … Bansky? Having indeed submitted entries five times, the graffiti artist has yet to claim the prize – the root vegetable itself skewered on a rusty nail. And this vogue for alternative prizes, created in opposition to their mainstream equivalents, is growing. Elswehere, in literature, the Bulwer-Lytton contest honours stunningly bad sentences; a tribute to the now legendary beginning ‘it was a dark and stormy night.’ Another is The Diagram Prize, which honours terrible titles. The results of The Turnip Prize will be announced in a week’s time.
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