British Artist Marries ... a Rock

British artist Tracey Emin, known for work that is confessional and "so wincingly personal that actually interviewing her seems slightly redundant," as Post Magazine puts it, has announced that last summer, at her home in France, standing under an olive tree, and wearing her father's white funeral shroud, she married a rock. Well, more specifically she says she married a large, ancient stone, she tells the Art Newspaper. "It just means that at the moment I am not alone; somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not going anywhere. It will be there, waiting for me."

But the 52-year-old, who has never married or had children and is still "trying to crack the code myself," may be engaging in an act that is more than merely literal, as the Guardian reports in its rather forgiving comparison of Emin's decision to Michelangelo's "vivid" relationship with stone: "In one of his letters [Michelangelo] claims that stones themselves cry out at political oppression. In his great unfinished sculptures of slaves, human forms struggle to emerge from raw stone like souls trying to be born from the chrysalis of carnality into the life of the spirit." Not getting it? The Guardian concedes that both Michelangelo and Emin "had some funny ideas," but concludes: "That is because they are truly poetic artists." (These people married inanimate objects.)