32 2GM Tuesday September 15 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
For sale at Sotheby’s this month are
Ming vases and an assortment of prints
and etchings by the most famous artists
of the 20th century.
Besides all that fine art and crockery,
collectors can also acquire pieces from
the golden age of a globally influential
art form, populated by grand masters
who were not merely famous but noto-
rious. Lots include the leather jackets of
the rap group Salt-N-Pepa, Slick Rick’s
diamond studded eye patch and the
golden crown worn by Notorious B.I.G
for a photoshoot days before he was
shot and killed in 1997.
Cassandra Hatton, the curator, said
that the event was the first hip-hop sale
by a major auction house. She expected
interest from “many of our existing
clients who are buying Picassos or
Monets or whatever it is” alongside new
bidders. “When you think about the
global impact of hip-hop and how
many people are into hip-hop, that’s
generations of people,” she said.
Ms Hatton, 42, counted herself
among them. At Sotheby’s she is
charged with putting together sales of
Japanese families are avoiding the
trouble and expense of burying their
loved ones in earthly graves by
sending their ashes into the heavens
in space burials conducted with
brightly coloured balloons.
A company north of Tokyo has
devised a way of inserting cremated
ashes into a rubber balloon which is
inflated with helium to a diameter of
8ft and then released.
After about three hours, according
to the company, the balloon reaches
the outer edges of the stratosphere, at
a height of between 40km and 50km,
where the reduced air pressure caus-
es the balloon to swell in size and
burst, scattering the ashes. The frag-
ments of balloon, made of biodegrad-
able rubber, fall to Earth and natural-
ly decompose.
The company that came up with
the idea, Balloon Kobo, has carried
out 300 burials and has bookings for
100 more. They cost ¥240,000
(£1,760) per set of human remains, or
¥180,000 for pets. Additional human
remains can be sent on the same
balloon for a discounted rate of
¥120,000. The job of powdering upashes to a sufficiently fine consisten-
cy to go in the balloon costs another
¥30,000.
But all of this is much cheaper than
the traditional practice of interring
ashes in a crypt below a family grave.
The average cost of a funeral in Japan
is the equivalent of between £10,000
and £15,000, including food and drink
for mourners, and fees paid to priests.
A family plot can cost the sameThe card arrived in the postbox of an
old white house in Belding, Michigan,
this month. The home’s owner, Brit-
tany Keech, noted the green stamp,
which had been bought for one cent.
It was addressed to a Roy
McQueen and came from Flossie
Burgess, who reported that “we are
all quite well but mother has awful
lame knees”. She wanted to know if
Roy had “got his pants fixed yet?”
The postmark said October 29, 1920.Grass roots The Spanish designer Marta Casal takes the straw hat back to basics at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Madrid
In da auction house: now
Sotheby’s goes all hip-hop
books and manuscripts and also with
organising the sale of items “that ha-
ven’t been sold before,” she said. Two
years ago she worked on its second auc-
tion of moon rocks.
For the hip-hop auction, she worked
with Monica Lynch, the former presi-
dent of Tommy Boy Records who
helped to launch the careers of Queen
Latifah and De La Soul. The crown
worn by Christopher Wallace, other-
wise known as Notorious B.I.G, came
via Barron Claiborne, the photo-
grapher who took his picture for Rap
Pages Magazine. The musician’s manag-
er, Sean Combs, worried that the
stripped-down style of the shoot made
his man look less like the “King of New
York” and more like “the Burger King”.
But the cover became one of hip-hop’s
most enduring portraits. It has an esti-
mate of up to $300,000.
Replicas of the Salt-N-Pepa jackets
are one of the best sellers in Halloween
shops, Ms Hatton said. “They are just
massive, recognisable pieces. The origi-
nals were stolen out of their dressing
room years ago.” When the group per-
formed in a commercial in 2015 new
jackets were made and those could
fetch $12,000-$18,000.United States
Will Pavia New York
MORTIMER PETERSSEN/DYDPPA/REXTeenager’s letter arrives 100 years late
Will Pavia Ms Keech, 30, a mother of two,
posted a photograph of the card on a
Facebook page called Positively
Belding.
“Flossie Burgess was a friend of my
mother-in-law and lived in an apart-
ment house on Liberty Street in
Jamestown, NY, in the ’90s,” wrote
one respondent. “She seemed a seri-
ous person, well dressed, who always
kept a Kleenex up her sleeve.”
Robby Peters, a librarian, found a
Florence Burgess in city directories
for Jamestown, New York. Accordingto his research, she was about 13 when
she wrote the postcard to her cousin,
Nora Murdock, in Michigan. Ms
Murdock had married a Canadian
immigrant named George “Roy” La-
Roy McQueen.
No one has yet established whe-
ther Mr McQueen’s trousers were ev-
er mended.
Mr Peters and another researcher
found living relatives in Canada for
Ms Keech to contact. “I want to give
it to them in person,” she said. “I feel
connected to them.”amount again, including grave-
stones, but excluding the annual “do-
nations” of several thousand pounds
to the Buddhist temple that main-
tains the cemetery.
Families are also expected to regu-
larly clean and place flowers on the
graves of their forebears, a particular
burden to those who have moved
away from their ancestral homes.
Balloon Kobo reports that some
families have closed down their
family plots and sent several genera-
tions up into the sky. “We are receiv-
ing a growing number of requests
from those who are at a loss about
where to keep remains because they
do not have burial places,” Yoshihiro
Onodera, the president of the com-
pany, told the Asahi newspaper.
Balloon space burials can be held in
an open space of at least 30 sq ft, as
long as it is unimpeded by tall
buildings, power cables or airports.
6 A Dutch woman was the first to be
buried in a coffin made from mush-
rooms. Sander de Haas chose it for his
mother, an environmentalist who
died aged 78. “Loop cocoon” coffins
cost up to €1,500 and take about a
week to grow in a box-shaped mould.
Once buried, they help “recycle” the
body into soil nutrients.Japanese bow out with
a bang at balloon burials
Japan
Richard Lloyd Parry To k y o
Mourners at a space funeral. The
ashes are in the largest balloon