Dali Planet #150: Hotel George V
Bowled over by the conceptual album “666″ by Aphrodite’s Child, Dali had Vangelis and Costas Ferris around to his suite at the Hotel George V to help him write a script for a happening in Barcelona that would mark the unreleased record’s premiere.
It involved martial law being declared for one Sunday, everyone being barred from the streets, including at the event, except for a pair of shepherds to serve as witnesses, massive loudspeakers playing “666″ all day, soldiers dressed in Nazi uniforms arresting anyone they might find loose, hundreds of swans surgically implanted with dynamite and exploding “in slow motion”, and military planes bombing a church with elephants, hippos, whales and actual archbishops.
The happening, to no one’s surprise, never happened, but Costas’ pessimism was eased at one point when he asked Dali about financing the event. As the musician writes on Henk Engelen’s Vangelis website, “He laughed and took a small canvas, a pen and some ink, and did in front of us a painting in 40 seconds! He added some glue, and he applied two leaves that remained from his salad!
“He said: ‘Now, this painting has of course some value’. Then, he signed the painting and said: ‘Now, I’m sending this painting to an American collector, for $200,000′.”
