A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about Leonardo's Last Supper. In the course of researching it, I turned up an old story about a Christian group who reworked it to cast each of the apostles as a businessman; they gave Judas a Microsoft business card.
I secretly found this much more interesting than the topical discussion I'd set out to have. This law of unintended archive search consequences (let's call it Clarke's Law) has been in operation again today. A pair of Scottish artists have caused a minor fuss by planning to make and cook black puddings using their own blood (a case of "Fry-up causes stir", if you will).
The whole project struck me as a rather anaemic attempt to create a controversy. In any case, I thought, the idea's been done better, by Marc Quinn, with his sculpture Self. That sculpture, you may recall, used nine pints (often given as the total amount of blood in an adult body) of Quinn's own blood and was cast as an image of his head. I was very fond of that sculpture, which I thought had a haunting quality that I would guess the black puddings won't. Nonetheless, I won't pretend I didn't laugh out loud when I turned this story up in the archive.
