Body Worlds 2: Giving a Whole New Meaning to Body Art

I spent Saturday morning looking at splayed-out corpses.  Or alternatively I spent Saturday morning looking at “plastinates” – specially-preserved human bodies variously sliced-and-diced to illustrate anatomy.  

My reaction is ambivalence.  There was an educational element to the exhibit.  There was a drop of science.  

However, I found it on the grotesque-side that the bodies were treated like artwork, posed with sporting equipment, each titled and dated in tribute to coroner creativity (not to say I could claim surprise from how the exhibit has been advertised). Is the point of the exhibit to show how many ways to skin a human?  

I can’t say it doesn’t make sense for an anatomical exhibit to show different cross sections and different perspectives to illustrate a biological concept.  However, the more educational aspects of the exhibit were the tissue samples and organ groups shown in isolation, as well as samples illustrating various disease pathologies.    It does aid understanding to see a brain damaged by a stroke or lungs blackened by miner’s lung.    

But I did not see any educational benefit to placing skis on the feet of a corpse cut bilaterally, in an echo of what might happen were a cartoon character to ski through a tree.  

Now, this feeling is tapered by my libertarian leanings.  Assuming there’s no health code violations, if people want to sign up to be cremated and shot-up into space or displayed as body art, well that’s their prerogative.   But what am I saying.   If the pretense of science was dropped altogether, and some whacked-out artist wanted to make her final work be Plastinated Marie Antoinette No. 2, wouldn’t that be beyond the pale?