ARTNET.DE DIGEST
by Kimberly Bradley



Word on the Eurostreet is that the next big thing in art just might be death. This recent brush with fatality started with a news item in the Art Newspaper on Apr. 17, 2008, reporting that the German artist Gregor Schneider -- known for often-spooky architectural manipulations, including rebuilding his house in the German pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale -- was planning to stage a performance-art piece in which the Museum Haus Lange in the Rhineland city of Krefeld would exhibit a dying person as an art object. A Düsseldorf-based pathologist named Roswitha Franziska Vandieken was supposed to assist Schneider in finding a subject willing to pass away in public. Schneider was quoted as saying, "I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died. My aim is to show the beauty of death."

...more