by Alistair Strachan of The Fortean Times

Transplant patient Jennifer Sutton paid a visit to an exhibition in London called The Heart today, mainly to check out a particular item on display – her own heart.

Jennifer, 23, from the New Forest, UK, had a heart transplant at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, on 4 June 2007. She lent her heart to the Wellcome Collection for the exhibition to increase public awareness of donation and Restrictive Cardiomyopathy, the disease that would have killed her.

As you might imagine, she found the experience very odd and moving. “Seeing my heart for the first time is an emotional and surreal experience. It caused me so much pain and turmoil when it was inside me. Seeing it sitting here is extremely bizarre and very strange. Finally I can see this odd looking lump of muscle that has given me so much upset. It’s tremendous it has become an object of fascination and will get people thinking about the disease, heart transplants and organ donation.”
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An unnamed investment group has agreed to pay $100 million in cash for the final piece of Daimen Hirst’s June 3rd show at London’s White Cube Gallery. The platinum skull, studded with 8,601 diamonds was the final piece and brings the 2 gallery exhibition to a total of 180 million pounds ($362.4 million),

“The sale is expected to close in three to four weeks, when all the paperwork is finished, Frank Dunphy, Hirst’s business manager said. The group of buyers would be required to show the skull for two or three years in museums around the world.”

Usually, buyers operating at the $100 million level would get a discount, private dealer Richard Polsky said.

The buyers probably wouldn’t be “diamond people,” because the skull’s price was so much higher than the value of the diamond content, said London jeweler and art collector Laurence Graff, who looked at the skull when it was on show and didn’t buy it.

“I’m in the diamond business and I would only be interested in diamonds at diamond prices,” Graff said in a telephone interview today.”

The skull’s sale would enrich Hirst, 42, whose fortune has been valued at 130 million pounds by the London-based Sunday Times and who may get 75 percent or more of the proceeds of a sale, according to art professionals.
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In NYC, a filmmaker/games designer committed suicide last week. Her companion, a well-known contemporary abstract artist, has gone missing for 8 days and is presumed dead:

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The filmmaker, Theresa Duncan, 40, who has also drawn attention for her writings on cultural topics, committed suicide in their East Village apartment on July 10, the police said. Her companion, Jeremy Blake, 35, a well-regarded artist known for digital animation that blurs the line between abstract painting and film, has been missing since his clothes were found on a beach in the Rockaways on Tuesday evening, they added.

Link to NYT story. Here’s a related item on Gothamist. Modern Art Notes has more, including word that the Corcoran will go forward with a planned exhibition of Blake’s work. Above: still from Jeremy Blake’s 14-minute DVD art piece “Sodium Fox,” 2005. Link to Theresa Duncan’s blog. (thanks, Coop, and Circuit Master)

By Daniel Jeffreys in Seoul

Imagine an attractive and talented young woman who said she had an art history doctorate from Oxford. Vivacious and persuasive, she becomes the director of the Tate Gallery. Then, just after being hired to curate the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, she is exposed as a fake who failed to get a single A-level.

This scenario, reminiscent of a Patrica Highsmith novel with its hint of The Talented Mr Ripley, is precisely the scandal now rocking the Korean art world after one of its rising stars, Shin Jeong-ah, was unveiled as a fraud.

Until this week, Shin, 35, was at the top of her profession. Claiming to have a doctorate from Yale and a master’s degree from Kansas University, she was the youngest professor at Seoul’s prestigious Dongguk University and the head curator of the Sungkok Art Museum, home to some of Korea’s most prestigious exhibitions and the recipient of millions of pounds in corporate sponsorship from the country’s biggest conglomerates.

In the past 12 months Shin’s shows have included high-profile retrospectives for the British illustrator John Burningham and the French multi-media artist Alain Fleischer. The latter was a major event organised as part of the 120th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France. The opening, which Shin attended in her role as chief curator, was hosted by the French ambassador to Seoul. Read more

There’s a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall
And the bells in the steeple too.
And up in the nursery an ubsurd little bird
Is popping out to say cook-coo cook-coo, cook-coo
Regretfully they tell us cook-coo
But firmly they compell us cook-coo
To say goodbye cook-coo…
To you…

So long farewell, auf weidersehen good-bye

Update it has been confirmed that Edward Lifson has left Hello Beautiful as can be read here

Nothing is absolutely sure right now but WBEZ has redesigned it’s website and in the process there is no mention of Edward Lifson. Try to find his name anywhere and you come up with nothing. As you can see in these two photos of the website before and after it has gone from “Edward Lifson brings you in monotone polyphonic sound! Edward Lifson’s Hello Beautiful!” to “Hello Beautiful………….chirp…….chirp”. The Edward Lifson blog is not referenced and according to Alison Cuddy on this weeks show Edward Lifson is “out furthering his education on the arts”.
    

If it was a vacation they would have said vacation this isn’t Pro Wrestling where you have to have a fake injury to keep the “plot” moving while you bask in the Jamaican sun for a few weeks. Is he out like Kane walking the earth learning about art from the people that cross his path (and solving crimes on the side?) or is it more likely that with the new look comes some changes for WBEZ only time will tell. Until it does and we can in fact say goodbye to Hello Beautiful, it’s 1980 tone music opening and it’s monotone euphoria of this weeks “Hello Fellow!” we will count the seconds till it is over just as we do when we actually listen to the show.