Ways of seeing

The whale, now dead, has now become art, according to David who I met last night.
His friends will make it into an art-object, strip it down and display it.
How do we then view the whale?
As art in the making?
John Berger is this week's obsession.
In this book,
he writes about how representations of animals in distant cave paintings:

All the drama that in later art becomes a scene painting on a surface with edges is compacted here into the apparation that has come through the rock to be seen. The limestone opens for it, lending it a bulge here, a hollow there, a deep scratch, an overhanging lip, a receding flank.
When an apparition came to an artist, it came almost invisibly, trailing a distant, unrecognisably vast sound, and he or she found it and traced where it nudged the surface, the facing surface, on which it would now stay visible even when it had withdrawn and gone back into the one.

So where is the whale in this?
Is the whale just spectacle, watched like the eclipse here,


or will it be transformed by these artists into something new - Steve says here that art is about making something new from the inside?
Watch this space.
PS David is doing a gig here. It will be wonderful, I promise, and Eliza Carthy is also playing who is fantastic.
I will be in Barnsley, doing this project but that will also be very exciting.
Anyone in London, you should go.