Carts

Drawings by Taizo Yamamoto.

Cavern

Collages by John Stezaker.

The List

Claude Clonsky's Untitled (supermarket) wallpaper

Fragment from an interview with Umberto Eco, We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can't be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

Umberto Eco chose to work on a theme described as “The Infinity of Lists" for an exhibition called Mille e tre, on view at the Louvre November 7, 2009- February 8, 2010

The exhibition Mille e tre traces the evolution of the concept of a list through history and examines how its meaning changes with the passage of time: from its ancient use in funerary traditions to its present-day use in everyday life, via the creative processes of contemporary artists, the list is a vehicle for cultural codes and the bearer of different messages.