Grave Gallery

Nao Bustamante is one our art treasures. Her work in video and performance is often exaggerated and campy, but comments on serious issues of violence, gender and even life and death. When I read about the opening of her Grave Gallery, on the site of her own cemetery plot, I knew I had to go, despite being bleary-eyed. It’s located at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery off Melrose, where many other great and good (and not so good) celebrities have found their way, including director Cecil B. DeMille, actress Judy Garland, singer Yma Sumac.

Bustamante has long been fascinated—even obsessed— with death since she was eight, when her godmother and two daughters died in a car accident. In January she bought a plot at Hollywood Forever. “I finally decided that the only way I was going to handle it was to make it an art project,” she explained. For the performance she donned a huge black cloak topped with a metal pail, and spoke through a vintage metal megaphone that mediums of the past would have used. She called out, banged the pail with a stick, spoke to the dead, and eventually made her way to her own plot—followed by about 60 attendees. Bustamante got quite emotional thinking about those who have passed on. “There’s been so much death, there’s been so much life,” she said, before shouting, “Where’s the damn champagne?!” And then toasted us all.

Great Britain is in serious decline. The City has lost its position as Europe’s indispensable financial center, the UK economy is in recession and its vaunted National Health Service is in shambles. The Tories have ruled Britannia for 12 straight years, much of it in dealing with a self-imposed catastrophe known as Brexit under the inept leadership of Cameron, May and Johnson. Then there was Liz Truss who served as Prime Minister for about 60 days—the only thing she will be remembered for is formally presenting herself to QE2 who promptly died. Queen Elizabeth served more than 70 years as one of most vapid monarchs in the kingdom’s long history, only to be succeeded by the insipid King Charles III.

Symbolic of the long decline and fall of the British Empire is the possible loss of the most important artistic treasure in England—the Parthenon Marbles, which have been on display in the British Museum for two centuries. An impending deal for the Parthenon Marbles to be returned to Greece at long last is being negotiated. After decades of false starts, a return or loan of at least some of the marbles seems likely.

In the early 19th century, most of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon pediments and at least half of the spectacular frieze spanning the interior walls of the ancient Greek temple— considered to be the most beautiful building of antiquity—were commandeered by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Turks at the time).

Elgin’s prime mission was to save the treasures of the Parthenon from theft or destruction. He concluded that to save them he had to ship them to England. To do so, he spent much of this own fortune to bribe the Sultan’s retinue and received a firman, a type of edict from the Sultan, which gave him putative authority to ship the marbles and other items from Acropolis temples to England, where he intended to display them at a private museum. However, a divorce cost him the rest of his fortune and he sold the marbles at a loss to the government, which installed them in the British Museum in 1817. They have been on display there ever since.