Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:02):
To me, October is like the best month for meaning death for a lot of people is what makes us appreciate what we have. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:33):
Welcome to a special Halloween edition of Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell eig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Cole and Perry, dual certified theologist and public health educator. For the past few Octobers, we focused on the museum's ghost stories, so you should go back and listen to those episodes. If you've not heard them this year, I wanted to do something a little different, so I invited Cole to look at some more morbid artwork with me. Well, thank you for joining me again, Cole. And for those of you who haven't heard our last episode together, I actually should have done my research and listened, but I can't remember whether I said it there that you should come back for this or if we just talked about it off mic. But since it is the spooky season and you have a spooky career. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:42):
Yeah, I do. And let me tell you what, if there's ever a month in the year when people want to talk to a tologist, it's October. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:49):
You're 

Speaker 2 (00:01:49):
Like, 

Speaker 1 (00:01:50):
Yeah, you're just like, just 

Speaker 2 (00:01:52):
Full 

Speaker 1 (00:01:53):
All October. I could imagine. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:55):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:56):
Yeah. So let people know just what a tologist is. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:59):
So I'm a tologist. That is the study of death and dying, and I am very well versed in all aspects of death and dying and how it intersects with so many aspects of our life, including art, which we're going to talk about today. 

Speaker 1 (00:02:14):
Yes. And so last time we talked about a couple of artworks that kind of touched on death and dying. We looked at the memorial to Elizabeth Duveneck and we also looked at our mummy. So if you want to go back, those are great pieces that we talked about in that one. So this time I thought we'd look at some other works in the collection. Actually, I remember you said last time you're like, I thought we'd be looking at painting. So I thought we'd start, I thought we'd start with a painting, and we're looking at painting by Bernardino Mai. I hope I'm saying that right. I'm not Italian, 

Speaker 2 (00:02:51):
And I tried to look up online how to say it, because being a Kentuckian, sometimes I'm not great at delicate pronunciation. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:01):
Yeah, me neither. My instincts would be my or May, but I don't know. Hey, Italians, come correct me. Yes. So this is Alex. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:09):
Oh, you know what? I have an Italian last name. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:12):
This. I'm thinking that 

Speaker 2 (00:03:12):
Shameful. So I just married it. Okay. I just married 

Speaker 1 (00:03:15):
It. Okay. Yeah. Okay, that's fair. I was thinking, I was like, wait, isn't it Perry Italian? So we're looking at Alexander the Great and the fates, and this is a very large painting. Might be the first thing you notice when you walk into this room. I'm 

Speaker 2 (00:03:33):
Struck by how actually big it is in real life. I don't know what I was thinking, but I peeked at the image before coming in. And when you're looking at it online, you have no idea for the scale and just the impact of sitting in front of something where actually the people are larger than life. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:54):
In 

Speaker 2 (00:03:54):
Real life, really. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:56):
All the people in the foreground are definitely about life size or maybe a little bit bigger, and there's a lot of people here. So that makes for a big dain. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:04):
And there's a lot of pandemonium, I would say, going on. When you look at this, we've got someone who's feet are on an angel on the ground. There's a femur bone that someone's foot is stepping on. We got a baby just over here. There's swords. There's an angel coming down from the sky. So you've got angels above and below, which is I think very much a metaphor for the typical presentation of death in across time and culture. Most religious traditions teach that what happens after you die is a reward punishment system. So you'll either be rewarded with heaven and we have this angel above, or you'll be punished and the angels below. Well, 

Speaker 1 (00:04:49):
This is actually so the one above. So they're not actually angels in maybe the traditional sense of, I mean, 

Speaker 2 (00:04:58):
What are they? 

Speaker 1 (00:04:58):
Well, okay, so the one above represents fame. And so this is fame is sort of saying, don't worry, your story is going to live on 

Speaker 2 (00:05:10):
Interesting. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:10):
Basically it's like a comfort to Alexander. And then below I believe is Kronos who represents time. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:18):
Okay. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:18):
So you see the hourglass there, that's kind of broken. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:21):
I see. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:23):
So while they look very much what we expect, the traditional sort of rendered in the kind of angely way in that they got wings, they are actually more specific kind of characters in this story. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:34):
So each of these people in this painting is representative of 

Speaker 1 (00:05:39):
A real 

Speaker 2 (00:05:39):
Concept or 

Speaker 1 (00:05:41):
So the three ladies over here are the three fates of the fates. Yes. No, 

Speaker 2 (00:05:44):
About them. And you 

Speaker 1 (00:05:45):
Have now I'm always getting their names mixed up. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:48):
Their names are, well, there's the Roman and then the Greek. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:53):
Oh, okay. Right. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:53):
So I believe the Greek, they're Clotho. LAIs, L A C H E S I S and a Tropos. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:00):
Yes. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:01):
And the three of them represent what is it like life itself, the length of your life and your death. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:11):
So the one over here who's kind of the oldest and gnarliest looking one, she's got the big shears and she is the one who cuts, cuts your life thread the 

Speaker 2 (00:06:20):
Thread. Yes. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:21):
So you can see over here, the other fates are sort of beginning taking the thread, which I think that's why it's coming out of this baby's hand is sort of representing the beginning of life, and then the life is being kind of woven. It's sort of your narrative of your story as being this that's going on, I think it's called a nitty knotty, is that thing that you go back and forth with the yarn. It could be crazy. And then she is sort of the person who decides where you die on that thread. And so you see Alexander here as fighting it. And then that's what the fame from above is sort of the comfort 

Speaker 2 (00:07:03):
Fame. You know what? You're going to die, but don't worry, we're going to talk about you after you're death. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:08):
Right. You'll famous, be comforted 

Speaker 2 (00:07:10):
By that. And also the red fabric, 

Speaker 1 (00:07:16):
There's 

Speaker 2 (00:07:16):
This long scarf situation that is just wrapping that's got to be symbolic of something. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:21):
I don't know. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:22):
Because a lot of times the red lines that represent blood being human being mortal, 

Speaker 1 (00:07:30):
Yeah. I'm not sure what it represents, or if it has, it might very well may have. I mean, one of the things it definitely does is it pulls your eyes right into 

Speaker 2 (00:07:37):
Him. Yeah. It's so striking. It's the only place in the entire painting that there's this bold, bright red 

Speaker 1 (00:07:45):
Compositionally. What it does is it totally pulls you right to Alexander and it kind of sets up, here's the star of the painting. I mean, if you can imagine it without him, it would suddenly become probably, you would think more about the fate in the middle. Really, if you didn't have that big red cloth, it would just become more about her show necessarily than his show. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:07):
And what's interesting is the fates here, they're always women represented. Traditionally they look like mortals. They don't have wings. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:16):
Right. Yeah, that's true. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:18):
And in my research, just from digging into this, I read about how there's this in both the Roman and the Greek tradition that you can sometimes bargain with them 

Speaker 1 (00:08:29):
To 

Speaker 2 (00:08:29):
Give by yourself a little bit more time. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:32):
And 

Speaker 2 (00:08:32):
That is such a mirror for how many of us deal with death in our own lives. Have you heard of magical thinking? 

Speaker 1 (00:08:40):
Yeah, sure. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:41):
And we always hope for a miracle, and we always hope for, well, maybe I'll be the exception or 

Speaker 1 (00:08:47):
Maybe 

Speaker 2 (00:08:47):
This one time. And so it's interesting that this is a concept that humanity has long held near and dear. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:56):
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I keep thinking too about when you referred to them as angels, it's really interesting to look at this and think about that. We are looking at a painting that was made probably by practicing Christians 

Speaker 2 (00:09:16):
1667, 

Speaker 1 (00:09:17):
But is referencing Greek gods and 

Speaker 2 (00:09:21):
Things 

Speaker 1 (00:09:21):
Like that, which is pretty normal, especially when you look at the Renaissance and later. And they use these classical themes 

Speaker 2 (00:09:30):
Even 

Speaker 1 (00:09:30):
Though it is not still the religion of the time. And so I think that sort of representation of angels and things, that the way that things have deities have been shown in other artworks in Christian artworks is kind of creeping back into this sort of non-Christian representation 

Speaker 2 (00:09:50):
Now with the three fates. So from my understanding, the Roman perspective on the three fates wasn't necessarily negative, but, or no, I think I switched that. Yeah. No, no. The Greeks, they were kind of a fan and it wasn't negative, but the Romans, 

Speaker 1 (00:10:07):
The 

Speaker 2 (00:10:08):
Roman sort of perspective on the three fates was not necessarily positive. It was more negative. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:14):
Interesting. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:14):
And they were called Nona Kuma and Morta. So I just thought that was kind of interesting how you can have the same concept, the three fates, but you've got one group that sees it as maybe not so bad, and another that sees it as kind of a bummer. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:33):
They taken on a slightly sinister quality with the Romans. That is interesting. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:39):
So in Snow White, the Witch, and she's spinning 

Speaker 1 (00:10:43):
Now, I'm like, when is there a spinning wheel in Snow White? 

Speaker 2 (00:10:47):
Now you're going to have to do research after this 

Speaker 1 (00:10:49):
Because all I'm thinking of is sleeping beauty with the spinning wheel and that, 

Speaker 2 (00:10:52):
Wait, maybe it's Sleeping beauty. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:53):
Sleeping Beauty has a spinning wheel. What she pricks her finger on that sends her into 

Speaker 2 (00:10:58):
Disney confusion, Disney 

Speaker 1 (00:10:59):
Confusion. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:00):
That's why 

Speaker 1 (00:11:00):
I was like, wait a minute. Sleeping Beauty has this spinning wheel that is interesting in me. And maybe there is some sort of connection there with just that idea of thread in life and being somehow connected. I feel like spinning wheels do come up a lot in fairytales, and I don't 

Speaker 2 (00:11:18):
Know 

Speaker 1 (00:11:18):
If it's just like when they were written that it was just more of a facet of life than they are now. I'm not sure. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:26):
And then that also, because I was thinking deep about this, connects to the idea of a spinster, which is this term that we have only for women that never marry, relates to spinning on the wheel. It's like, oh, you don't have a partner, so you're just going to do this. But we don't have an equivalent term for men. I mean, I guess it's what Bachelor. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:46):
Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:47):
So it's kind of interesting to think about how, but there's 

Speaker 1 (00:11:49):
Nothing derogatory about Bachelor. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:51):
Right. But whereas spinster 

Speaker 1 (00:11:52):
It 

Speaker 2 (00:11:53):
Negative. Yeah, totally. But that word itself literally comes from this spinning thing and the attachment there. I also saw in a lot of Pagan traditions, Gaelic traditions, similar connections between this thread being representative of that thread can be cut at any point and that it ends your life. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:15):
Yeah. I know that the three fates definitely kind of seems to transcend a lot of cultures. I know they have sort of a Norse equivalent too. I think I read that the norms who mostly I just know about from the ring cycle, they appear in the final opera and then go to Rung. That's the beginning, or the three Norns who are kind of like the fates, and they're doing a similar weaving thing too, that's also involves spinning thread and yarn and stuff. So a lot of it seems to be this idea that has gone across a lot of cultures. And it's interesting. And even if you think about the idea of I can't help but make connections with Macbeth and the Three Witches, this idea of three ladies out there who are kind of puppet masters of things. It's just this big idea that crosses into a lot of different cultures. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:13):
No, I have a question for you. So this painting is massive. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:16):
It's real big. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:17):
And this was done in 1667. Where was this being put? Because this wasn't, oh 

Speaker 1 (00:13:23):
My gosh, 

Speaker 2 (00:13:23):
Was this in a castle type? 

Speaker 1 (00:13:25):
People's 

Speaker 2 (00:13:26):
Houses are too small? 

Speaker 1 (00:13:27):
My best guess. Yeah. I mean, obviously if you are painting this for somebody, they are a person of means 

Speaker 2 (00:13:35):
Wealthy. See 

Speaker 1 (00:13:37):
The fact that you both commission a work this large, which is going to cost a lot of money because it's so much work to make it, and then obviously having the space for it. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:48):
Now the frame on this thing, the frame is black and gold and it's huge. And what's unique about this frame is there's actual three d, I guess wooden carvings 

Speaker 1 (00:13:59):
Of, 

Speaker 2 (00:14:00):
And there's all kinds of symbols in the actual carvings. Now is this frame original to the painting? 

Speaker 1 (00:14:06):
I knew you were going to ask me that, and I have no idea. I mean, I'll go peek at it right now just to see if I find any more information. So I got up and read the label. It says, and we were 

Speaker 2 (00:14:17):
Pleasantly surprised to find, I'm surprised 

Speaker 1 (00:14:18):
That it says this frame was the original and was created specifically for this painting, which like I said, I don't know how it, no matter what frame was up there, was going to be created for this. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:32):
Just 

Speaker 1 (00:14:32):
You don't know if it was created, we often wouldn't know was made with the original or not. But in this case it was the original, which is kind of cool. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:40):
It's so cool. The fact that this frame was made in 1667 and it's covered in these three dimensional carvings that are obviously symbolic. I see. It looks like a sacred heart, but it's got the flag in there, the sword, and there's all this symbolism that there's the fig leaves it looks like is connecting to some of the broader themes that are in the painting. Wow, that's amazing. Somebody hand carved these things in 1667, and we're sitting here looking at it right now. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:08):
I know. It's 

Speaker 2 (00:15:09):
Amazing. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:09):
Doesn't look crazy. So when I looked at the label, I also saw that something I had forgotten about this piece, which is that it actually was made to commemorate the death of Pope Alexander. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:22):
Oh, see there, it's how much art happened because somebody died and we needed to acknowledge that. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:31):
So it's an interesting, but I'm going to make this piece about the death of another Alexander to commemorate the death of the Pope. And it is again, interesting to make such a secular artwork for the death of a pope. For the 

Speaker 2 (00:15:44):
Pope, 

Speaker 1 (00:15:45):
Right. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:45):
Because no, I don't see a crucifix or anything in here. The typical, 

Speaker 1 (00:15:51):
And again, we were talking about the kind of quasi-religious way that some of the characters are handled. It seems to sort of 

Speaker 2 (00:15:57):
Borrow 

Speaker 1 (00:15:57):
From the language of Christianity in certain aspects. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:00):
Are there people that are experts in frames? 

Speaker 1 (00:16:03):
I'm sure there are, but 

Speaker 2 (00:16:05):
That's what they specialize in. 

Speaker 1 (00:16:06):
I'm sure 

Speaker 2 (00:16:07):
People 

Speaker 1 (00:16:07):
Are who are all into historical framing. I'm sure there's a whole world of that. I'm sure there are frame dealers and people who hunt for that stuff and try to find historical frames. Absolutely. And I mean, frames can be worth a lot of money in and of themselves, 

Speaker 2 (00:16:23):
So I'm sure it's a good business. It's like with coffin makers, originally coffin makers, that was just an extension of people that were cabinet makers and furniture makers in town, and they would put in their little ads that they were available on short notice, and that's how you knew that they would make coffins. But there was really nobody that was like, I'm obsessed with coffins and that's what I make. Interesting. They were always furniture makers that then this was an easy add-on basically. And its frames are woodworking, you know what I mean? So these had to come from specific people 

Speaker 1 (00:17:00):
That 

Speaker 2 (00:17:00):
Had this. I don't know. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:01):
Well, you set me up with a perfect segue. So let's move on to our next piece because that is a great place to move on. We are in gallery 2 0 3 and everything in here is Spanish and a lot of it is medieval art. So we have this kind of area that sort of looks like a little chapel because a lot of these are murals that came. They're frescoes that came from a chapel in Spain. So on the walls you'll see the areas that are kind of behind the plexiglass up there are the original murals, and then some of it has been painted to look like you're in an old chapel. So it's a spooky space. This is one of the haunted areas of the museum we've talked about in our first ghost tour, we visit this and yeah, this is where guards have reported seeing sort of monk like hooded figures and things. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:07):
Interesting. What do you think that they're attached to? 

Speaker 1 (00:18:10):
What 

Speaker 2 (00:18:10):
Is the object that's keeping them here? 

Speaker 1 (00:18:12):
I mean, I guess it would really have to be the murals themselves or this guy. There's really nothing else 

Speaker 2 (00:18:21):
Here. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:21):
I mean, the relo over here is another altar piece that's behind us or to the side of us when you come in that was not in here for a while, so 

Speaker 2 (00:18:31):
Guess has been 

Speaker 1 (00:18:32):
Come and gone. So I'm not sure which piece you would think is particularly haunted, but I think this space lends itself to 

Speaker 2 (00:18:42):
Spookiness. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:43):
It is. I mean, I'm sure you can even hear in the recording the echos of it. It's just got a feeling of it that's like, it feels old and spooky. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:53):
Well, it's kind of like when you walk into a beautiful church or a cathedral and you're like, man, I better be on my best behavior because it feels like that's what I need to be doing here. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:01):
But then also I think it's probably that feeling when you come in and you see this carving here, this effigy that is from a casket and is clearly part of a funeral practice or something that also sets the spooky tone for people probably as well. It's the tomb effigy of Don Sancho Saiz Carillo. I didn't take Spanish, so I hope that was pretty good. And this is from around 1300, so it's pretty old. 

Speaker 2 (00:19:34):
And you can tell there's remnants of this piece was obviously gilded and painted, and that's most of it's long gone, but you can see the intricacies of the carving. Do you know what kind of wood this is made out of? Well, let's 

Speaker 1 (00:19:48):
Look over here. It might tell us, 

Speaker 2 (00:19:49):
Because certain types of wood poplar used in Oh poplar, okay. Used in favored for death related things. Interesting. Particularly the yew tree, y e w. That's got long, long, long connection to death and dying. That's why a lot of churchyards, which is the term for a graveyard next to a church, they usually have yew trees in them. And the idea was that the U tree itself would help the spirits of the dead get to the underworld. It was like that word that we've talked about. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:24):
Oh yes, yes. My new party, A cocktail party trivia word. 

Speaker 2 (00:20:34):
So a psychopomp is somebody who, it's like a deity and they wear, it's across cultures, different religious traditions. Basically every culture has one. The grim reaper is a psychopomp and a psychopomp doesn't judge you. They just help your soul get to where it needs to go. So the Egyptian psychopomp is Anubis, the Greek ferryman, Sharon, am I saying that right? The Roman God mercury was a psychopomp. The Norse tradition, Valkyries, Shiva, Vishnu Yama, they had messengers that would do that as well. So it's 

Speaker 1 (00:21:14):
Interesting. I never would think about the Valkyries as a psycho pump, but yeah, that's totally 

Speaker 2 (00:21:19):
Fits right. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:19):
Since I keep bringing up Wagner, that's what, when you hear ride at the Valkyrie from Val Kura, that is the introduction of the Valkyrie is they come in to take the bodies of the soldiers back to Valhalla. So yeah, that's true. I never even think about that as they're basically the grim reaper showing up. That's so 

Speaker 2 (00:21:40):
Crazy. As we're talking about psycho pumps here, and we're looking at this carving out of wood here, and this is Spanish. I don't have a listing here for what the Spanish equivalent, because usually there would've been a deity or something that was associated with that. And usually if somebody had, not everybody got this treatment. Not everybody had these life-sized carvings made that depicted who they were. I don't know who is the Spanish equivalent psychopomp in Spain. 

Speaker 1 (00:22:12):
That kind of leads me though just to who is the Christian psychopomp? Because 

Speaker 2 (00:22:17):
Really we're just talking about in Judaism we have the Angel of Death. 

Speaker 1 (00:22:20):
That's 

Speaker 2 (00:22:20):
A psychopomp. Angels I think would be, yeah, I guess it really just 

Speaker 1 (00:22:25):
Would be kind of, I mean I feel like yeah, that's probably true. I guess we're just dealing with Christianity in general, so I don't, 

Speaker 2 (00:22:33):
Yeah. And then in a lot of indigenous traditions, shamans are psycho pumps because they help the souls get to where they need to go. So now I want to look into that because knowing about pumps helps frame your understanding of death and dying across times and cultures because when you understand that someone is being buried here, someone is being memorialized, it helps always to have that broader context to know who were these little characters that people were expecting to be involved and to be around at the same time. And from a sort of psychological perspective or how we know people deal with grief, 

Speaker 1 (00:23:14):
Knowing 

Speaker 2 (00:23:15):
About things like psycho pumps help us process loss, it gives it more meaning. It helps give a sense of stability. When grief is a destabilizing event, it's sort of like your whole life gets turned upside down when someone dies. But if you can know that the angel of death is coming and the angel of death came from my parents and their parents and their parents before them, it brings the stabilizing influence and that's one of the theories for these concepts have survived. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:48):
Yeah. Now you've got me wondering, where does the Grim Reaper come from? 

Speaker 2 (00:23:53):
Yeah, because see to me, the Grim reaper is like a pop culture thing. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:58):
That's what I was thinking. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:59):
But from it's not has start there. Start 

Speaker 1 (00:24:02):
There has to some real beginning. Right. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:05):
And the grim reaper that doesn't judge you as being good or bad, grim Reaper's like, Hey, time to go. 

Speaker 1 (00:24:14):
But I wonder if the Grim Reaper is just kind of inspired by artists' version of the Angel of Death. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:21):
That would make total sense 

Speaker 1 (00:24:23):
Popular versions of how is death often represented in tarot cards. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:29):
So on the death card, the grim reaper is often used in tarot. The death card is the 13th card. It's attached in number 13, and it's usually represented by the grim reaper or an entity that we would associate as that a psychopomp. But the death card in tarot is not actually about you're going to die. It's more that something has ended or what has died that you're not letting go of. But I mean, that kind of is a good question that a lot of grief therapists and counselors will work with people. Let's say that so-and-so died a year ago, but you've been unable to really move forward. And so the question then is why are you not putting this to rest in a way that will allow you to move forward? 

Speaker 1 (00:25:15):
Interesting. Now I keep thinking about when does tarot even emerge? When does that 

Speaker 2 (00:25:21):
1445 around then, and it was called Roki, T A R O C C H I, Italian, more like a game. And then I actually just went and saw the largest, oldest most complete tarot deck in June of this year at the Morgan Library Museum in New York Tarot cards. These decks were commissioned by wealthy families, the same people who'd be commissioning a lot of the paintings and stuff that are in here. It was so neat to be able to see these little artist pieces, these tarot cards painted by hand, gilded, just like this thing that we're looking at and all the paintings in here, and you can see the usage where people's thumbs would rub off parts of the cards 

Speaker 1 (00:26:08):
And 

Speaker 2 (00:26:08):
They would use the cards to just help make sense of life. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:12):
Because 

Speaker 2 (00:26:12):
Part of the challenge of being a person is coming to terms with the fact that you may think that you've got things planned out and you know what to expect, but at any moment, like the three fates tell us, someone can cut that thread. And that is where struggle and suffering comes from. When things don't go a way that we think that they're going to go. And that's why we have all these things created across time and across culture to help us navigate and get through difficult moments in all of our lives. That is what makes us human. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:48):
I am now wondering, I feel like I want to go back and do more research now on that time period too, and just to kind of wonder of does this connect with things like the type of people who would be collecting bodies and things like that? What was the typical, what did a person wear in that? What was the uniform of that person? Is it related in some way to the way we represent the Grim Reaper is a person who comes and literally collects the dead, but then given a sort of supernatural twist or something. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:19):
It's 

Speaker 1 (00:27:19):
Kind of an interesting, I want to go do 

Speaker 2 (00:27:22):
Some research on this to jump back into the psychopomp thing. Have you ever heard people say, people have deathbed visions and they see the people who they knew in real life but had died before them, they were waiting to come get them. Those are a psycho pumps. So the other piece of this is that you too can be a psychopomp one day. You know what I mean? Which is kind of a nice little concept. And I love, so October in America, it's Halloween. We like to feel spooky and get spooked out. Then next month we like to be thankful. And then the month after that, we like to give and receive gifts. Okay. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:59):
In October, I've never really been into the, let's get creeped out spooky thing. To me, October is the best month for meaning and for taking stock of what you have and death for a lot of people is what makes us appreciate what we have. It's like you grow up, you're a teenager, and then in your early twenties, somebody dies. That's your first experience with death. And that's the moment when you realize, whoa, life is short. I need to get it together because of death that many of us find our purpose. We find meaning. We find clarity because of that, because of this terrible, horrible thing. So it's kind of an interesting juxtaposition and humans have created all kinds of things to help us navigate it, like psycho pumps and this casket topper that we're looking at essentially. 

Speaker 1 (00:28:51):
Well, I think that that's a lot of, I don't know. I've always, I was thinking about this recently and just with Halloween and the sort of weirdness of it as a holiday in that it is this moment where we all sort of celebrate the macabre and 

Speaker 2 (00:29:08):
They're all, let's make our houses look like trash. I love that. But the rest of the year we're trying to increase the equity in our homes, but know in October, let's make it look like we haven't taken care of it in 15 years, 

Speaker 1 (00:29:19):
That it's actively dangerous place to go. Yes. I've always loved that about Halloween. I think it's may be part of my love of it has been. I realize the same thing about people decorating is that it's a moment where you actively exercise bad taste in a way. Yeah. You sort of practice, I'm going to do, I know what looks good, and I'm going to do the opposite of 

Speaker 2 (00:29:42):
That, and I love 

Speaker 1 (00:29:42):
That. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:44):
And then I will post a picture onto Facebook and I will expect all of you to like it and tell me how great it looks. But 

Speaker 1 (00:29:51):
I also think there is something probably actually deeper in all of that, that is how we kind of work our way through that or sort of laugh at the horror or laugh at the horror of death and all of that. And I mean, I'm really into horror movies, and we just had a horror film fest here where we showed three films all around vampires. And one of my thoughts was I kind of knew that some people would be like, why is the art museum showing horror movies in that there's this sort of sense always that horror is low art and beneath us, and I just don't really think it is. And I think it's actually usually sometimes, maybe subconsciously, sometimes consciously on the part of the creators, but is dealing with our cultural fears. 

Speaker 2 (00:30:40):
Yes. I think it helps us make sense of important aspects of our culture and of our humanity. And I think that we also have to keep in mind that the month of October in 2019, death is in some ways as common as it was before, but in some ways it's not. For example, my great grandparents' generation, one of my great grandparents had 10 children, of which only four survived to adulthood. So in a lot of ways, it's theorized that our deal with Halloween, at least here in the us, is it's kind of a way for us to take control of something that we ultimately don't have control of, and it kind of gives us a stabilizing effect. We're all talking about death in the month of October, and we're all okay with it right now. And we all feel like we have control. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:27):
Yeah. Movies, have you seen Midsummer yet? 

Speaker 2 (00:31:29):
No. Oh my gosh. Scary movies. I don't like scary movies. I don't like upsetting movies that says the person who deals with death all day. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:35):
It is kind of upsetting. So I don't know if I would recommend it other than I think it is a movie that it just came out this last summer, and I think it's just now out. You can, 

Speaker 2 (00:31:45):
I heard it's very creepy. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:47):
Yes. 

Speaker 2 (00:31:48):
Or unsettling. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:49):
I mean, yeah, this is not a movie I'm going to lightly recommend because I would say if you are not a person who can handle that sort of thing, and I wouldn't recommend it, but it's a movie that ultimately is about grief, 

Speaker 2 (00:32:06):
And 

Speaker 1 (00:32:06):
That's why I was like, oh, you should see it. Because it is ultimately about a person for whom traditional society has failed them in the way that it has given them no real way to grieve a really terrible loss. 

Speaker 2 (00:32:20):
And 

Speaker 1 (00:32:20):
Then they have gone to a place that is this sort of crazy community, but it is actually giving them a way to grieve and a sense of community in that moment, which 

Speaker 2 (00:32:33):
Is what helps you move through grief is community. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:36):
So the whole movie is really ultimately about a person overcoming grief and in the guise of a horror movie. And it's really fascinating. So while it sounds like you probably wouldn't enjoy it, 

Speaker 2 (00:32:49):
But you're not the first person to tell me, I need to watch that, but you raised a point that made me think about this guy here, a little friend that we're looking at. Imagine how you would feel knowing that, let's say that you have a loved one that died, but your family doesn't have the wealth to be able to commission a life-sized carving to memorialize your loved one. How did that feel for people then? I mean, even today, I was going to 

Speaker 1 (00:33:16):
Say, I don't think it's so much different. I, 

Speaker 2 (00:33:18):
Yeah, I was going to say, even today, 

Speaker 1 (00:33:20):
I don't think I could fund a life-sized sculpture of anyone right now, 

Speaker 2 (00:33:26):
But I just wonder what it was like then, and did people really think that other people were set apart, or was it something where the poor people knew? Well, it's just they have money, they just have dollars, but we're no different. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:42):
Yeah, I mean, I think it also just comes down to what that makes me think of is also when you have the money to do this, how different were the medieval Spanish from the Egyptians in a way of it's, they don't literally believe in the same kind of afterlife and the same maybe sort of literalism of, I'm going to take these things with me. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:08):
But 

Speaker 1 (00:34:08):
Then there's something about it that's like, this is a way of being remembered, 

Speaker 2 (00:34:13):
Of feeling like you're not really going to be dead because you're leaving behind this life-size replica of you and 

Speaker 1 (00:34:20):
Hey, it worked for old Don Sancho because we 

Speaker 2 (00:34:26):
Got 

Speaker 1 (00:34:26):
His name on a wall right now and we're talking about him. So good for him. I guess you can take it with you. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:33):
That's right. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:36):
I mean, that's the difference. I mean, all of the other people who lived in whatever town he lived in who died and who didn't have sculptures made of them is nobody's talking about them in a museum right now. Although the greatest, I think we maybe talked about this the last time, is the Mummy is literally a person and it just is unidentified male mummy person. So it's like we don't really know anything about them in a sense, but it's just like, well, he's here 

Speaker 2 (00:35:04):
And we have the tomb of the unknown soldier. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:06):
Oh, yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:06):
Right. So it's just interesting culturally how we have these exceptions to situations where it's normal to have dead people on display where we're like, no, no, this is fine. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:18):
Well, and in that case, I think that's the idea of a tube of an unknown soldier, that it represents something bigger. It's like one body that represents all lost in a war, right? Yes. It's sort of this figurehead of, 

Speaker 2 (00:35:33):
And it reinforces the nobility of losing your life in that manner. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:36):
And the sort of unknown is what gives it the power 

Speaker 2 (00:35:41):
To 

Speaker 1 (00:35:42):
The fact that people have figured out who it is, and they've tried to keep it secret. They don't want it out who, 

Speaker 2 (00:35:49):
Because there's something that's happening that's creating an effect that some people want in keeping it unknown. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:56):
When it becomes a named person, it does not represent everybody anymore. It represents that one person. So it's like it loses all of its strength 

Speaker 2 (00:36:05):
When you 

Speaker 1 (00:36:05):
Know who it is. Well, we should move on to our next piece. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:10):
We're getting chatty about these, 

Speaker 1 (00:36:12):
And I'll have to look at my notes to figure out where we're going. 

Speaker 1 (00:36:30):
So now we are in the Asian galleries. This is kind of a long hallway gallery. This one is 1 39, though I feel like it's one of these where when you get down to the other side, it's actually 1 38, but it's all the same room. So this is, and actually a brand newish acquisition for us. They just went on view, I think the museum acquired them last year in 2018. And they're just what's called a pair of funerary jars on the label. But we kind of have been referring to them as soul jars. That's a sort of common way people refer to these types of jars. And they're a type of funerary vase, though, as far as I can tell. I don't think they were ever meant to actually hold human remains or anything. That's not like when you hear funerary vase, I think people think of an urn or something, but that's not really what this was about. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:24):
And 

Speaker 1 (00:37:25):
One of the things when I brought up pointing, bringing this to you, what I thought was interesting is that they come in a pear, 

Speaker 2 (00:37:32):
Which 

Speaker 1 (00:37:33):
I think reflects this very Taoist idea of yin and yang, which I think is a little bit different than a lot of the other sort of western takes on death that we look at, because it's sort of interesting to think of something as not being just one, this represents Don Sanchez or whatever, here is the one sculpture of him, but that there are two sort of vessels, one representing yen, one representing yang sort, having male female having sort of, one is the primary creatures on them will be dragons, one is tigers. So they represent that kind of hot and cold, essentially of a person or of everything of life. And I think that's really, really fascinating. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:20):
One of the things that's inappropriate that I keep hearing in my head every time I was looking up information about Soul Jar as I'd go, Soja boy, tell him 

Speaker 1 (00:38:31):
I keep thinking about 

Speaker 2 (00:38:33):
Soja. Boy, 

Speaker 1 (00:38:33):
I just keep thinking. So Soulja like soul train. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:39):
Okay, so that said, what's interesting about Eastern traditions and perspectives on death, and particularly the Chinese, is they have a view that at least the ancient Chinese, that a death itself was polluting. So it's the juxtaposition of clean and unclean. 

Speaker 1 (00:38:58):
Oh, 

Speaker 2 (00:38:58):
Okay. So if we frame that in this context, then the body is unclean and then therefore the soul is clean. 

Speaker 1 (00:39:08):
Interesting. And 

Speaker 2 (00:39:08):
Then we have duality represented elsewhere. We talked earlier about the reward punishment way that afterlife is often depicted. If you were good, you go to heaven. If you were bad, you go to hell. And there's literally no room for gray area. So I think it's interesting that we've got two of these here. Now, you had touched on how these do not hold cremated remains or body parts. That is true. The idea was just from my understanding is that they would sometimes put things inside of them, and the idea was it was for them to use in their afterlife, 

Speaker 1 (00:39:44):
But 

Speaker 2 (00:39:45):
Not always. 

Speaker 1 (00:39:46):
Yeah, I don't exactly have the full details, and they haven't been out very long, so 

Speaker 2 (00:39:50):
We 

Speaker 1 (00:39:50):
Haven't written a lot about them, but I know these are much, much older. But next door we have the really ancient Chinese wine vessels, and those are also used as more of a ancestor worship is the idea that these are wine vessels, but it's not like for you to have a party 

Speaker 2 (00:40:11):
And 

Speaker 1 (00:40:12):
Pour wine out of is like we are pouring wine in this, and it is for our ancestors, symbolic, 

Speaker 2 (00:40:17):
It's like what we do at Passover as Jews. Yes. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:20):
So I think that's true. That's kind what I wondered if, yeah, they might be putting things in there for the afterlife or as offerings. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:30):
This acquisition here, both of these jars, were these from one family or for one person? 

Speaker 1 (00:40:39):
I mean, they definitely look like they were made at the same time. I don't know again if they represent necessarily one distinct person. So again, I was trying to look for information. It was a little dodgy, but you can kind of see here on this that it says, Soja originated in the late third century when China experienced tragic episodes of continuous turbulence known as the turmoil of the Yung Gia era. And if you notice though, the time here is 

Speaker 2 (00:41:06):
Probably only five years. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:07):
Yeah, it's not that long. But I was looking up what is this? And apparently, basically there was a lot of political upheaval, and apparently around 30,000 civilians were murdered. 

Speaker 2 (00:41:21):
So bingo, here we have it. This is what this is. There were that many people that died. There is no way that that society or neighborhood or town would've been able to support that many dead people at once. And just like what we had here in the US with the Civil War, that's when embalming was created. We had so many casualties. The struggle was, oh my gosh, how can we get these people back to their families? And we couldn't always, but if you have a Soulja, this is a way to honor your loved one in a way that doesn't harm their soul or their chances at afterlife. 

Speaker 2 (00:41:56):
And these soul jars or ary urns, these are predecessors to the urns that we use today in modern America. I can tell you that when somebody dies and they choose cremation, and the family's got to pick what to put them in, there's a lot of thought and a lot of times, a lot of money that goes into the vessel that's going to contain the remains of that person. Now, that's not a soul, that's actually the physical remains. But the idea is still there. A lot of times we choose modern day earns that represent qualities of the person or things we want them to have connection to God or being reunited with Jesus. So they put crucifixes and stuff on the outside. But man, if there was that many deaths in a short period of time, see then I'm wondering, did this exist before that era? 

Speaker 1 (00:42:49):
Well, so that's interesting is that happened. If you look at the timeline, we're talking like 300 and then when these are actually made almost a thousand years later, 

Speaker 2 (00:42:59):
Years later. 

Speaker 1 (00:43:00):
So I feel like it is born out of that tradition of these people who migrated away from this tragedy, but a way of kind of honoring their dead. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:11):
Interesting. 

Speaker 1 (00:43:12):
And so that's my understanding. I could be wrong about this, but because was trying to make sense of the timelines and things, that was sort of where I kind came to is it makes a sort of sense of this probably is not tied to a specific person in a way of that it is again, the idea of ancestors and people who maybe existed thousands of years before 

Speaker 2 (00:43:35):
You. And both of these are rung with little figurines of people. It looks like 

Speaker 1 (00:43:39):
People. So 

Speaker 2 (00:43:41):
This is really interesting. See, I'm really curious now about who these were for or what family they were for 

Speaker 1 (00:43:49):
And they were given to us. You can see by Bong Kim, who's an artist actually who has had art here. We own some of her and their family. So I don't know how their family acquired that, but that's where they came from. But yeah, it's an interesting piece. And again, the idea of the duality of it just is interesting. And I think even if it's not probably meant to necessarily represent one individual, the idea of having the pair, and that sort of seems to be a thing that is common with all of these soldiers is that they come in pairs usually. I just think that's again, a different way of looking at death and life in general, really. And that's an interesting idea. 

Speaker 2 (00:44:35):
Well, and after somebody dies, one of the tasks of coming to terms with your loss is a lot of times we all have to reckon with the fact that, okay, this person died. Maybe you did not like them at all, but your friend loved them. They had a completely different experience with the same person. And that duality of how each of us lives our lives and we have good relationships with some people, we have bad relationships with others. There's something reflected in that concept of what we deal with modern day that I see in these jars. This idea that you can be one person but have these two completely different aspects. And then we live in duality. We have day, we have night, and the eastern tradition weighs heavily on east and west as well, and the opposites in directionality. So I think that's kind of interesting just to think about. The other thing in doing some digging I found is that soul jars are represented in some modern day video games. 

Speaker 1 (00:45:36):
Oh, like what? 

Speaker 2 (00:45:38):
I think I wrote it down. You speak 

Speaker 1 (00:45:39):
My interest by saying the video game magic word. And I'm suddenly like, yes. 

Speaker 2 (00:45:44):
Whenever we look at old stuff, I always want to know, well, what are we doing with this now? 

Speaker 1 (00:45:51):
Where 

Speaker 2 (00:45:51):
Did this trickle up and end up in modern day? Because what I have found, especially with death stuff, we don't let it go. We don't let stuff actually die. These soul jars versus today's modern day urns that we stick people in, it's the same kind of idea. But anyway, let me see if I wrote it down. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:11):
Well, I can look it up later too. If there's something. I know I can always put it in a little coda or something. If there's 

Speaker 2 (00:46:18):
Something 

Speaker 1 (00:46:19):
Interesting there, all you have to do is be like, it's in a video game, Russell. I'm like, Ooh, I'm 

Speaker 2 (00:46:24):
Much more interested. That really piqued your interest there. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:26):
So I actually just started playing this game this weekend that I was actually thinking about you while I was playing. I was like, I wonder if she plays video games. Doesn't 

Speaker 2 (00:46:34):
Involve farming. If it does, I'm into it. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:36):
No, and maybe it's one of those things where it's like the shoemaker doesn't want to play a video game about making shoes, so maybe this would be wildly uninteresting to you. But so it is called Return of the Obra Den, and it is a very strange game, but it is basically you play as an insurance like man who from the East India trading company, who's going to this ghost ship that everyone has died on. And your job is to look at the log of everyone who's been on this ship and figure out what happened to them. 

Speaker 2 (00:47:13):
Okay, see, I would be interested in this because it doesn't sound like you're getting murdered or people are chasing you to kill you. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:19):
No. Okay, so what you have, 

Speaker 2 (00:47:21):
I don't like that. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:23):
So the only tool you have is this book where you keep track of things in it, and a pocket watch that is sort of a magic pocket watch that when you find a corpse, you click it and it shows you the last exact moment of their death frozen, oh 

Speaker 2 (00:47:43):
My God. Oh my God. Another historical reference. And the Victorian era here in the US and over in Europe, when somebody would die, you would stop all the clocks in the house at their time of death, and you would leave it that way for a set period of time based upon what was socially acceptable. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:59):
Interesting. And this sort of takes, actually, I was kind of looking to see if I could remember what time of year or what time it takes place. And I wouldn't say it feels like the 19th century, but I don't know if it's old 

Speaker 2 (00:48:11):
Times. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:12):
I mean, it's definitely, I would say between the late 18th and 19th century, somewhere in there when East India trading was still a thing. But so you use these last moments and they're frozen in three D space, but you are able to walk around them and get clues to figure out, and you hear usually about a few seconds of audio before you're able to see that scene. So you're trying to connect how somebody might say something, and you have to remember, okay, that person called out for this person and who was in the scene. 

Speaker 2 (00:48:48):
See, that's interesting to me. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:49):
Use deductive reasoning to try to piece it all together. But it is really fascinating because those moments are always based on exactly the moment when somebody died. And then those can be tricky because sometimes the moments when they died was not what caused the death. 

Speaker 2 (00:49:07):
Something 

Speaker 1 (00:49:07):
Happened to them earlier, but they died later. So then you have to figure out, well, hopefully there was another dead body somewhere when that happened. And you're looking for clues to figure out what happened to this person. See, 

Speaker 2 (00:49:20):
That's cool. See, yeah, that's kind of my speed of game there. I don't like to be chased and people trying to murder me. That's not fun for me. You can take your 

Speaker 1 (00:49:31):
Time because right. No, there's never threat to you. 

Speaker 2 (00:49:37):
Like 

Speaker 1 (00:49:37):
The player. You are only able to walk around these frozen scenes of other, so cool. That's so cool. And the other thing I didn't mention that's kind of really amazing about it is it's all a three D game, but it is rendered as if it were a Mac game from the eighties. Oh, cool. So everything is black and white, and it's sort of line art, and then the sort of dithering to create the gray scale. And it's really interesting looking because it has this weird feeling of past and future. It's like, where is this in time? It's a really strange 

Speaker 2 (00:50:16):
Game. That's cool. So for someone who really just plays my N 64 and Harvest Noon, it will be familiar a little bit. 

Speaker 1 (00:50:22):
Yeah. I think somebody who doesn't play a lot of games could find their way around it, even though I know it is essentially a first person game. So you are walking around in three D space. That can throw a lot of people. But other than that, like I said, you have your time to look and you're never, there's nothing, you don't have to be quick reflexes or anything. And it's more of a detective thing where you're trying to, yeah, it requires a lot of really clever thinking, and sometimes 

Speaker 2 (00:50:50):
That's cool. I feel like games are so much smarter now. Just the fact that I found a reference for these soul jars in a modern day video game. These game designers are researching stuff stuff. You know what I mean? That's way different than when I was a kid, 

Speaker 1 (00:51:06):
When I was playing Uncharted four, I remember I was creeping through somebody's house who was an old art collector or something, and I was looking at the stuff in this person's attic or something. I was like, oh, that's an Amarna period. Egyptian base that looks like something from our collection. It wasn't just a token like Egyptian vase. I could pinpoint it to like, oh, that's a Marna. That's that specific looking style of Egyptian base. 

Speaker 2 (00:51:33):
That's incredible. 

Speaker 1 (00:51:33):
So yeah, the kind of detail, I'm always obsessed with that. I've actually wanted to do an episode sometimes with one of our curators to show them sort of fake decorative arts that are made because there's so many things that are jugs and the things that just occupy space. And it's the same idea of making decorative arts, but in a totally digital world where these things only exist in this fictional world. But somebody also did put a lot of time and care into digitally making this thing. 

Speaker 2 (00:52:05):
Do you think that video games are actually a great opportunity for education about the arts? 

Speaker 1 (00:52:11):
Yeah. I mean, they could be. I don't know if anyone wants to play art history adventure, 

Speaker 2 (00:52:18):
But if you weave things in subtly or something, I 

Speaker 1 (00:52:22):
Don't know. I guess I feel like it's probably more that just like any other field, those people are making them are coming to it clearly with that background. And then they are putting it into that. And if you understand that, you get a greater appreciation of it. It could be, I don't know if that would be fun 

Speaker 2 (00:52:42):
Or how to make that fun. 

Speaker 1 (00:52:46):
Maybe there's something there. It's great when that stuff is informing it. When I look at and when people don't do a good job of it, I notice it. You can tell I was watching, I can't remember if it was Victoria or The Crown, I think it was Victoria. 

Speaker 2 (00:53:01):
But 

Speaker 1 (00:53:01):
I think both shows are a little guilty of this. And a lot of the production designers, they will use actual paintings and then they'll just print them and frame them and put them up. Actually, one of our paintings was in the Crown. Oh, which one? They didn't tell us. They just 

Speaker 2 (00:53:17):
Did. It 

Speaker 1 (00:53:18):
Was in, it's one of the portraits of two children in our British galleries, and it was hanging over the crib and in the Crown when they were spending a lot of time in the nursery, I think. Interesting. But I was watching, I think, I'm sure it was Victoria, and there was a sort of portrait of probably a royal or somebody, but I think the production team had decided, well, this painting needs to look really big because I want it to fill the frame or something. They had this sort of idea, but you don't see portraits that really giant, 

Speaker 2 (00:53:55):
Huge. 

Speaker 1 (00:53:56):
Generally, if you think of even that painting we were looking at today, everybody was essentially life size. And anytime you go too much bigger, it feels a little weird. And so in those sort of portraits of people, if they're really a big painting, it's usually a full scale portrait of somebody. So you see them head to toe. It's like, and then if it's just a head and shoulders kind of portrait, it's usually roughly the size of a head and shoulders. It doesn't go that big. And this was printed at a scale that was so 

Speaker 2 (00:54:27):
To 

Speaker 1 (00:54:27):
My just instincts, looked very weird. I was like, I've never seen a painting from that time period that big that 

Speaker 2 (00:54:33):
Way. 

Speaker 1 (00:54:34):
That's a thing that you would happen in the 20th century or later. 

Speaker 2 (00:54:36):
Yeah, I was going to say that sounds like something a modern day artist would be doing is playing with the scale. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:54:41):
Yeah. That's not uncommon. Or even photographers, that's a thing that was popular in the early two thousands or something is like, we're going to make this 

Speaker 2 (00:54:51):
Huge face 

Speaker 1 (00:54:51):
Like a giant head that's like a photograph that's in really crystal clear detail. So you can see every blemish and problem with this person, and we'll print it uncomfortably large because we now have the technology to do that as well. But yeah, it's just like that look of a giant painting looked weird to me. Again, I'm not a total expert on this, but I'm like, I spent enough time around whole painting, so I be like, that looks weird. That's not right. So in that case, there was something where I was like, I wish they had maybe been a little more accurate. But that's also 

Speaker 2 (00:55:27):
A 

Speaker 1 (00:55:27):
Very specific complaint to a person who works in an art museum. And I'm sure the rest of the public who's like, it's great. I love it. It's a big painting. Sure. 

Speaker 2 (00:55:34):
Yeah. I think my equivalent is a fan. Ontologist would probably be Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Five Stages. People think that her five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are the order that you go in grief. But she actually developed that based on observing people that are dying themselves. If I find out that I'm dying, I would tend to follow these stages. It wasn't for grieving people, but for some reason culturally in the US we've picked this up and been like, this is how you grieve. But really that's not how you grieve. And so that's the equivalent. So anytime I see these references in movies and things where they're like, oh, it's the five stages, I'm like, no, 

Speaker 1 (00:56:22):
I feel like another. Okay, now I'm on things that bothered me in pop culture 

Speaker 2 (00:56:26):
That were, yeah, I love complaining. Totally 

Speaker 1 (00:56:28):
Off topic, this is another one that I think is really funny is basically if you watch any movie, there aren't really a lot of movies that take place in the art world. So it's really not like there's a lot to complain about. But I feel like anytime somebody has a story to tell about art, it's usually some variation on the emperor's new clothes. It's usually about, this thing is garbage, and everybody loves it because they're so, they don't want to be the idiot who says the wrong thing. And my experience of people in the art world is usually they hate everything. That's not true. They don't hate everything. But it is rare that it's so funny that for instance, a curator in a movie is always like, did you see the latest blah, blah, blah, blah. It's genius. Everybody always is declaring everything is a genius 

Speaker 2 (00:57:21):
In the movie. What? They don't really talk like that. And 

Speaker 1 (00:57:23):
I feel like in general, it's like when they think something is good, it's kind of the rarity to like, oh, I really love this because it rises above everything else, which I think is either just okay or not. Okay. So it's just so funny that that is the story that is always told about art and art people. 

Speaker 2 (00:57:40):
It just repeated and it's like this accepted trope. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:57:43):
Of actually to bring it back to horror of this movie that came out recently on Netflix, the Velvet Buzz Saw. 

Speaker 2 (00:57:50):
Okay. 

Speaker 1 (00:57:50):
Which is a horror movie about the art world, which I was very excited 

Speaker 2 (00:57:54):
About because 

Speaker 1 (00:57:55):
I like both of these things. But it kind of has a lot of that of people, did you see the newest Damian, blah, blah, blah, blah piece. It was amazing. Everybody loves everything. And nobody has any sort of snarky, nobody hates anything. And I'm just like, that's not very real. That's 

Speaker 2 (00:58:11):
Accurate. 

Speaker 1 (00:58:12):
I feel like every, there's always somebody who's like, oh, I thought it was garbage. That's 

Speaker 2 (00:58:16):
Funny. Anyway, okay, with the Crown, using the piece that is in your collection here, what are people supposed to do? Because you guys own that and you can't come in here and take high resolution pictures of stuff. You're not even supposed to take pictures, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:58:31):
Oh, you can take pictures in here. So for instance, this label doesn't have any sort of no photo 

Speaker 2 (00:58:38):
Thing. Yeah. Some pieces will have that, some 

Speaker 1 (00:58:40):
Do. And so if we're not telling you it's not okay. And especially special exhibits, especially things that are on loan and things we don't own. A lot of times, you definitely can't take pictures of those. Sometimes we might own the work but we don't own the copyright or the reproduction rights for it. So we own this work, but the artist is still alive. 

Speaker 2 (00:59:07):
I see. 

Speaker 1 (00:59:07):
So they own the reproduction rights to their own artwork or sometimes they're dead, but their family owns the rights or their estate or blah, blah, blah. So a lot of work is protected for so many years after their death or then is protected by the estate. And then at a certain point the copyrights kind of go up in the air and come to us. So it 

Speaker 2 (00:59:30):
Depends on the piece. It depends. 

Speaker 1 (00:59:32):
Yeah. I mean, with something like that, the piece they were dealing with, it wasn't a piece we would've said you could not photograph, but ideally we would've probably loved if they had given us 

Speaker 2 (00:59:41):
A hint. Been aware of it or something. Yeah. So that's interesting. I 

Speaker 1 (00:59:46):
Just think, and I think we would've had more problem if they were selling prints of it and not crediting us or if that would be more of an issue, then it's this thing that's appearing in the background of an image that if they didn't use ours, they could have used anybody. 

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
And 

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
Honestly, we are probably happy to get to talk about it on social media for the 

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Day. I was going to say, that's a great talking point, right? 

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
We're happy to ride the coattails of Netflix in that instant. It's, we have way more to gain from that. Got 

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
A claim to fame there. 

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
We have more to gain from that moment, honestly, than they do. It still would've be nice, but I'm sure they are not in the habit of contacting anyone 

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
They 

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
Print. They probably don't. They probably just look through books. They probably have a catalog of art and they're just like, oh, okay, look, this is a great image. Or they know what the time period this would work, is this fits. They looked at the details and made sure, oh, the artist and the time period and all of it makes sense to be here. So it's all checks out there, but not too worried about who owns the work or anything like that. 

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Yeah. Most people don't even realize that's a thing. 

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
Yeah. Most people don't realize it is as complicated as it is too. Especially where it's like when it gets to those photo rights and things where people kind of go like, well, isn't it yours? 

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
This parallel cemeteries? You ever see this big mausoleums? So let's say that your great great grandparents bought a mausoleum and there's six spots and they're all full. 

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
Well, 

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
It's kind of like cemetery law is older than all basically other laws we have in the us It's older than zoning laws, all that, but sometimes the person who technically owns the mausoleum might be like a great, great, great grandchild, or if there were no heirs, it's like a cousin or something weird. And so there's some family conflicts that go on where you might have 87 descendants who all have an equal claim to the property, but they won't agree on. That's why sometimes you'll see mausoleums that have chains on the doors and why some mausoleums you can go into them. A lot of times it has to do with family conflict. 

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
Weird. 

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
I never thought about that. 

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
Interesting. Well, thank you for bringing our episode back to actually being about the topic. 

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Yeah. And I thought I have a few Halloween jokes to end on. Perfect. Okay. Okay. What is a mummy's favorite music? 

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
I don't know what 

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Rap. I know that was a good one. Okay. This is my favorite. Why did the ghost call a taxi? 

Speaker 1 (01:02:25):
I don't know why. 

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
Because he was sheet faced. I know. That's a good one too. And then finally, why do cemeteries have fences around them? 

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
People are dying to get in. 

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Yes. You got it. Yes. That's an old one. People are I know, but I figured the cemetery tie-in would be good. 

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us again, Cole. 

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be your unofficial. 

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
Yes, I know you are now. Yeah. Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking. Special exhibitions include the levy, a photographer in the American South, women breaking boundaries and treasures of the Spanish world. Join us on Thursday, October 31st from six to 7:30 PM for a special Halloween edition of Fine Art Flow. You'll explore art through yoga during this 30 minute Gallery talk and 60 minute yoga class. This evening. We will share spooky stories from Cam's haunted past. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and also join our Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Music Al by Lau. And as always, please rate and review us to help others find the show. I'm Russell eig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.