Christian Boltanski is a romantic committed to a covenant between art and death. Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Young Woman of Charleston, 1992, for instance, impassively archived the mortal effects of a nameless dead woman. The title, subtly telling of a life cut short, serves the artist’s conscious effort to induce melancholic feelings that transform an anonymous death into a figure of myth. Boltanski’s dramaturgy borrows from earlier romantics, not least John Keats, who instructed that his tombstone carry only the inscription HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER. Indeed, Boltanski’s