Shortsightedness, once again. In his effort to preserve his own ideas about the sanctity of the dead, Mr. Lee egregiously violated one of them. If I were even distantly related to the person whose corpse was smashed, I would not hesitate to undertake civil court proceedings.

What's next? Destruction of the Human Cross sections exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Il? Self-righteous nincompoops....

Did these people agree to be part of the exhibit before they died? That sort of effects how I feel about this.

Jesus, does anyone get this incensed when the American/British-led forces in Afghanistan are making corpses of formerly living Afghani civilians? If life is so frickin' sacred, why don't they get pissed off about their own tax money going toward profaning human life.

MC: yes, the people agreed to part of the exhibit; it's all in the article.

Art is the new religion - worshipped and defended as fervently as a Bible or Koran.

I just wanted to say that this is about my favorite BoingBoing article title of all time.

Smashing a hammer into a body will sure teach a little girl to respect life. It was a tasteful exhibit that was interesting to look at. We think mummies are cool – it's the same thing.

The guy's sentence should be once he naturally dies, he'll be plastinated in a position of wielding a hammer over another plastinated body.

His dumbassness should be preserved!

"Art is the new religion - worshipped and defended as fervently as a Bible or Koran." Yep, at least art has something going for it. We know it exists.

Appreciate your comment, timmyt. But the Bible and the Koran are as real as a Klee or a Titian. What I think you mean is the idea behind those books, God or Allah, that's the existence which is questionable. Can't disagree with that. Yet, paintings, sculptures, blah blah are no more than physical manifestations of a similar abstract idea: Art. As such, Art exists only in the way that God exists - we believe it does. People can be as illogically emotional and protective of Art as fundamentalists are about religion. That's the nature of beliefs. It's an irritating thought to some people, because they consider themselves intellectually superior to religious fundamentalists. But I find them much alike.

Edited by author 04-01-2002 08:08 PM
Jonathan -- worth noting that London has a fair number of mummies on public display (in the British Museum, mostly). For those wanting to see more corpses around the city, there's also the body of Jeremy Bentham in University College, and Jimmy Garlic in the church of St James, Garlickhythe, and probably several more I'm not remembering.

Sadly we still have our quota of eccentrics too, and some of them have hammers. And when you have a hammer, suddenly everything looks like a liver-- I mean a nail.

“I never believed in such a thing as evil until I saw that human bodies had been turned into commercial objects,” he said. Better live than dead, eh? Perhaps our vandal is a closet necrophiliac.

He did this because he believed an 8 year old girl was horrified right? Did he ASK her? Why was he carrying a hammer? Does he always carry hammers to exhibitions in case young girls are going to be frightened. I think a man with a hammer's enough to frighten most 8 year old girls. Great to see my glorious country producing such a rational response to this intelligently thought out exhibition.