Erin L. Thompson

Today, Jodie Foster came right back at me with a grim museum story of her own, so, fan for life!

Look - I could get embarrassed thinking about how every time I meet a celebrity, I end up telling them some incredibly grim story about museum collections… or I could just acknowledge that any time I meet anyone, I end up telling them some incredibly grim story about museum collections.

A bingo card for the ghost stories of M.R. James. Boxes read: "Spiders Terrible hotel stay Narrator makes fun of golf Latin passages Eerie disembodied voices Confirmed bachelor main character Vengeful spirit Evil magician Working-class character as comic relief Bleak East Anglian coast Visit to an archive Narrator in guidebook mode FREE SPACE Unholy doings in a church Frogs or toads Queen Anne style house Cursed artifact Don't buy that rare book! Something hairy and horrible Someone gets too curious Tentacles Story told via old manuscript Research trip gone horribly wrong Beds are scary Tactile horror

I couldn't resist. #pleasingterror

The fruit and nut bar of my dreams

Closest I've come to describing why Archaic Greek sculpture is so great in today's writing session was by contrasting it to the way High Classical puts the convention in conventionally attractive. Ya-awn.

It's proving surprisingly hard to write for the public about ancient art that I love without sounding like "here are my weird little guys look at my weird little guys!"

I'm so tired today because the secret society dinner at Yale ran so late last night (is a sentence that is true and that I most likely won't get to say again)

I was in that bookstore and saw your book prominently displayed! (Then went to Grey Matter Books, where one of the other patrons was wearing knee socks and a pith helmet. Very Yale day all around.)

Ate breakfast with many little photos of me

Bluesky labeled the original post as "adult material" so I modified it so it would show the image

Bluesky labeled the original post as "adult material" so I modified it

👗 Fabric samples from Marie Antoinette’s court gowns (grand habits), 1784, preserved by her dame d’atour Geneviève d’Ossun

Mme d’Ossun was charged with bringing the budget for the queen’s wardrobe into line following some seriously extravagant spending by her predecessor in the 1770s 👗

(Joke shamelessly stolen from @mtanderson.bsky.social)

William Blake’s illustration of my upstairs neighbor

Men, what’s stopping you from looking like this? With those delightful little pumps?

Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, later first Earl Granville, c. 1804.

"Public scholarship should not be reserved for celebrity intellectuals or tenured faculty at elite institutions. It's designed for anyone who wants to share their academic work and engage with the public" boom!

Thurs at 4PM, the inimitable @artcrimeprof.bsky.social is talking about "The Battle Over America's Monuments + Heroes" as part of the prestigious Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. I'm teaching during her talk, but my students are going + I'm so happy to see her on campus!

Sebastian (relic) no.1, 2016-2019, cast bronze with verdigris (urine) patina — Stuart Sandford I’ve just completed work on the latest edition of one of my bronze relic sculptures from my ongoing Sebastian series and it’s now on view at Childs Gallery, Boston. Sebastian (relic) no.1, 2016-20...

For more: www.stuartsandford.com/news/2019/7/...

photo of a bronze sculpture of the head of a handsome young man

photo of the sign

In 2016, the artist Stuart Sandford buried a bronze sculpture of a human head in the garden of the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles next to a sign that asked visitors to urinate on the spot to patinate the head. The sign ended with a cheery “thank you for your contribution.”

Edited down this chapter by 5k words!*

*Let's not talk about how many of those words ended up in the footnotes. Hush - you're safe there, my preccccious, my ccccccitations!

This piece is wonderful wonderful wonderful

"Jonathan Tokeley-Parry and Frederick Schultz would be the very first people in the United Kingdom and the United States to serve time for dealing in smuggled antiquities" is something I just wrote... am I right, cultural heritage law friends?

Blue is expensive when you have to make it from lapis lazuli!

Website Posing as Van Gogh Museum Shut Down After Selling Fake Tickets The Van Gogh Museum said it had shut down a website that was selling fake tickets to the institution.

Indeed! www.artnews.com/art-news/new...

Indeed! academic.oup.com/em/article-a...

Imagining Oldenburg saying "unauthorized potato" in an exasperated tone brings me such joy

and knockoffs of Claes Oldenburg's fiberglass sculptures of sour-cream topped side-dishes that the artist had to go around labelling as “unauthorized potatoes.”

a walking stick and a box of stuffed hummingbirds that supposedly belonged, respectively, to Queen Elizabeth II and Frida Kahlo
a Victorian vampire killing kit whose “silver” bullets turned out to be nothing but pewter...

For the introduction to my book, I put together a list of my favorite unusual fakes, which includes:
“Fauxbergé” eggs
hermaphroditic butterflies
historical harpsichords
mprobably old bottles of wine
entirely fictitious artists
both fake Van Gogh paintings and fake tickets to the Van Gogh museum...

Those are encouraging words - thank you!