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Heheh, I hear they're staying open 24 hours a day until the exhibit closes on Sunday - - perhaps you would have had better luck with crowds at 4 am?
I certainly agree that the full cadaver displays were primarily artistic, and only tangentially scientific due the subject matter itself. But the organ display cases seemed purely scientific to me. And although not much was explained about proper function, so much was illustrated about improper function that I felt a definite educational legitimacy.
In fact, I think the whole point of the exhibit, from the educational angle, was that a picture speaks a thousand words.
Sure, the text labels and display copy were inadequate. But I think the point was that what you saw with your own eyes told you so much more, or at least conveyed the information so drastically differently, than words ever could.
I have been an ardent student of anatomy and biology. I am quite familiar with the functioning of the human body. This exhibit gave me additional knowledge on a "grok" level.
And, of course, from the artistic angle, the piece just floored me. I'll agree that the set-ups with brick platforms and poor sightlines were substandard. But the displays themselves were so phenomenally unlike anything ever seen before that I can hardly fault them too much for poor presentation. This is, after all, a traveling exhibit. And I don't know how you could really display all those cadavers with better crowd sightlines while still allowing the audience members to get so up close to them.
A week later, the shock value has begun to fade, my xray vision thankfully doesn't function all the time anymore. I am still conscious of every sight I see traveling along my optic nerve to the brain inside my skull that directs the function of the I-bio-robot that I am. But I have begun to really appreciate the humour of the exhibit...
The black-lunged cadaver holding a lit cigarette. One particular gentleman so flayed that he looked like something from Hellraiser was actually wearing a top hat, and rotating! The way they had several of the cadavers holding what was removed: the skinned man holding his bunched up skin; the body-cavity dude clutching his internal organs in his grasp, the split man riding skinned horse holding his human brain in one hand and the horse's brain in another. And who could forget the circulatory family, mom and dad and happpy child riding triumphantly on mom's shoulders? How comicly morbid to see a family displayed in this pose when all their blood vessels had been injected with red plastic and the entire rest of their bodies chemically melted away to leave only their circulartory systems standing there in the perfect form of three humans.
Frankly, I think the plasticization process was the big scientific news of this exhibit, and I'm glad they went into that a bit more. Biologic misfunction was another focus (which, as I understand, will be even more strongly presented in the sequel exhibit which opens Jan. 29). But as for anatomy and normal biofunctioning - - how much do you need to be told when you can, for the first time, see it with your own eyes?
(Besides, all the explanations of what the heart does or the liver does, or even what enzymes hit what receptors, or even which synapses of the brain fire to tell the proteins to go here or there .... none of that tells you how it happens. We many never know how it happens.)
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