WORD of mouth, says director Fiona Bradley, explains the extraordinary success of those weird installations pulling in the punters at the Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer show: “Everywhere I go, people say, ‘I’ve been to your show, I’ve brought all my friends’.”
Between its opening on 31 July and yesterday, 42,434 people have been to see The House of Books Has No Windows. It has smashed all records for the Fruitmarket, and is up 26 per cent on last summer.
Installations such as Opera for a Small Room, w
ith its 2,000 records and eight robotically controlled record players projecting the life of a music-lover in the middle of nowhere, have brought people back again and again, Bradley says. They also remember The Killing Machine, an automated mix of a dentist’s chair and the execution chamber. “It’s art for people that don’t like art, but also art for people who do.”
The figures mean that Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, with a lot less hype, have pulled in double – yes, double – the number of visitors to Tracey Emin’s show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (20,158 to date). All right, you have to pay for “Oor Trace”, as the show is affectionately known, and the free Fruitmarket counts people in the café and bookshop. Impressionism and Scotland, in prime position on The Mound, meanwhile, beats the Fruitmarket – just – with 45,612.
No word, meanwhile, on how many people are rushing to gawp at the two £50 million Titians they never knew they had in the National Gallery of Scotland, before the bidding starts…
From Scotland, with loveBOND Bound, the exhibition of Ian Fleming cover art at the City Art Centre, played host this week to an auction for the Room to Read charity. More than £30,000 was raised through the auspices of Fleming Family and Partners as people vied to buy Highland holidays and dancing classes. The charity pays for schools, libraries, publishing, and girls’ education in poor countries.
Penny Lovell, head of business development of FF&P, recently paid for an entire school for 50 children near Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam rather than throw an extravagant 40th birthday bash. “I built a school that will help a lot of children for the whole of their lives rather than satisfy my ego for one night,” she says.
Find out more about the charity’s work, including how to make a donation, at
www.roomtoread.orgFive decades and countingTHE director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Catherine Lockerbie, celebrates an important birthday this weekend.
In the words of the [other] bard, “age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety … bless her when she is riggish.”
After consulting The Scotsman’s literary experts, we have come up with a suitable reading list: Life Begins at Fifty by Elsie Bleakley (1978); Deal With It: Life at Fifty by Frank W Fletcher (2001); I Ran Away to Sea at Fifty by Mary Sheridan Fahnestock (1939); Feel Fabulous at Fifty and Beyond by Angela Rippon (2003) and, er, Golf Begins at Fifty by Gary Player and Desmond Tolhurst (1988).
The full article contains 548 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
