The Bluestocking, vol XXIV: cadavers, liars and really old paintings

Hello!

I'm late, I'm sorry. Still, there is much reading goodness within.

Helen

Where the Bodies Are Buried

There are many reasons why people agree to donate their bodies. For some, it is as simple as wanting not to burden their families with the £3,600 that the average funeral costs. Others want to pay back the medical profession, or hope to train doctors to cure the disease that killed them. As they leave her office, Black tells the donors, “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but we really don’t want to see you soon.”

Ooh, which hot young cub reporter wrote this? Oh, how embarrassing, it's me! I really enjoyed researching this profile of forensic anthropologist Sue Black, who is perhaps our leading expert on human identification. She is also, despite a career trawling through mass graves and identifying child abusers from the veins in their hands, one of the most happy, engaging people I've ever interviewed.

The Confessions of R Kelly

There's a common way that journalists often choose to approach encounters like this. Ask all the easy stuff first. Get on the subject's good side, get their confidence. Leave the tricky stuff until late in the last interview, when everything else is safely asked and answered, and then grab what you can.

That's not how I'm doing this. First, if he isn't prepared to engage in some kind of serious discussion on the more difficult parts of his life, then I can't see how there can be a significant article about R. Kelly in 2016 that is worth printing. Second, it would make me feel spineless and undignified. I've read, listened to, and watched every other R. Kelly interview I could find, and too often what happens is that if interviewers mention anything at all, what they do is make a perfunctory little raid on the subject, touching it just to say they did. Why play around? He knows, at least to some degree, what's coming. He's a grown man, 48 years old. He's stood on a thousand stages and sat through a criminal trial. I know it's not going to be a comfortable conversation, but surely the most respectful way to have it is to get on and have it.

For fans of profile-writing, this one is interesting in formal terms - the juxtaposition of write-through and Q&A, and the way that it deals with the central question: when R Kelly insists he's not a sex offender, can we believe him?

Conservation versus Replication

I wander through the Met, which will soon take over the Whitney’s old location on the Upper East Side. I walk among the ancient sculptures that we leave fragmented and paintless even though we could try to restore the vivid polychromy they originally possessed. We refuse to undertake such restoration, however, because it would devastate the image of antiquity we’ve inherited from the Renaissance. I find that inconsistency somehow touching; I don’t want these statues to look like the loudly painted figures of the miniature-golf courses of my youth, even if they did.

I nearly didn't read this piece about the conservation department at New York's Whitney Museum when flicking through the New Yorker, but I'm glad I did. It's nerdily fascinating on pigments (the subject of a brilliant show a year or two ago at the National Gallery) and also on the basic philosophical question of what bit of a work of art is the work of art. For years, there's been a debate about conservation: should we try to make art works look like they did when they left the artists' studio, or should they show their age? I'm torn, particularly since seeing Botticelli's Primavera in the Uffizi a few years ago, or rather a vague brown smudge that looked vaguely like Primavera.


Quick links: The people getting really screwed by #OscarsSoWhite are Hispanic and Asian American actors, and black directors. "I was terribly wrong": writers reflect on the Arab Spring, five years on. How weird is the continued sale of Q-Tips (cotton buds), which are bought only for the one thing you're not meant to use them for? What To Do When You're (Both) Expecting: this story of a lesbian couple who gave birth three days apart will make you feel tired. Transgender people can now compete at the Olympics based only on hormone levels: this might have really interesting effects on eg women's basketball and weightlifting. The fascinating science of Tube escalators. Our film critic Ryan is angry about the Best Actor nominations. Tyler Shields is vying with Terry Richardson for the title of Photography's Biggest Douche. A cry of pain against that genre of article which can be summed up as "all white people (apart from me) are bigots".

What I've been watching: Lucy Worsley's programme about the Romanovs (iPlayer here). Apparently Catherine the Great didn't even like horses, never mind liking horses.

... and listening to: This episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage on race is fascinating.

Guest gif: When you get into an argument, then think better of it.

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