MUSEUMS ASSEMBLE! It's time for #CURATORBATTLE! 💥
— Yorkshire Museum (@YorkshireMuseum) April 17, 2020
Today's theme, chosen by you, is #CreepiestObject!
We're kicking things off with this 3rd/4th century hair bun from the burial of a #Roman lady, still with the jet pins in place...
CAN YOU BEAT IT? 💥 pic.twitter.com/ntPiXDuM6v
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Die Exponate unserer Albträume @faznet https://t.co/sGXAw4MXCF
— Deutsches Historisches Museum (@DHMBerlin) April 23, 2020
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44 comments:
Is this creepy enough?Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, in the Vienna Secession Building
Anything in the Mutter Museum (medical curiosities) at U Penn wins. Especially the megacolon.
A picture of Judge Kenneth Chu would be scary.
Run over to the House on the Rock and find something to submit.
That embalmed mannequin the Biden campaign trots out occasionally.
When I was curator, our library got a lot of p.r. out of the anthropodermic binding we had--Louis Richeome's L'Idolatrie Huguenotie, 1608.
According to the local collector's story, and the science of 1976, it was human skin binding; one of the last projects I was involved in was scientific testing in 2015 that determined it was NOT human skin.
We had quite a few lockets or braided rings of human hair. Not really gross.
Narr
And a bag of dried circus elephant dung
There's that mummy in the British Museum, in a glass case and creepy af.
Framed mummified bat.
A guy who called himself "Bat Mummy" created my fine avatar.
Did you know the Department of Defense operates the National Museum of Health and Medicine? (It used to be called the Army Medical Museum.)
Anyhow, they have The World Largest Hairball (which was removed from a girl's stomach). They also have(or had) an exhibit on syphilitic bones and lot's of fun facts about gangrene. BUT, the biggest most famous exhibit is the actual bullet that killed Lincoln displayed like the Hope Diamond. Ghoulish and historical.
Anything in the Mutter Museum (medical curiosities) at U Penn wins. Especially the megacolon.
The megacolon (acutally just a model of the real thing), the "soap lady," the death cast of the Siamese twins, and especially the skeleton of that fellow whose musculature turned to bone.
Small museum, plenty of oddities.
Klimt... What a kook!
I haven't been to the original source yet. Lots of mementi mori?
(I'm guessing at that plural construction.)
I'm partial to this one, which Ann directed me to.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/93798/picture-of-dorian-gray
As a curator who works at a Quaker historic site, I got nothing. Although years ago, at a different institution, we had a collection of WWI German 08 MGs stored under a bunch of children sized coffins. We also were able to borrow family held memorabilia of Gen. John Hartranft, who was Military Governor of the District of Columbia after the Civil War. He was responsible for carrying out the execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. He kept a section of each of the 4 ropes used, wrapped his business card with the names of those dropped around them, tied with a red ribbon. The rope was surprising small, not above .375 inch. Not necessarily horrible, but still residuals from 4 individuals demise however warranted. We also had the Electric Chair for our state, complete with electric panel, fume hood, cables, and a box with leather masks (with sponge still extant), holding both male and female versions. We could never, ever figure out a way to exhibit it in a neutral way, even down to arguing on wall colors, text font and size, etc. A continuous circular argument. I held that using it as a fund raiser - $5 for a polaroid (now i'm dating myself) of a visitor sitting in the chair, would certainly help the bottom line was not well accepted.
I'm pretty sure the Mütter is saying, "Hold my beer," on this one.
The electric chair mention above--my grandfather had the first electric chair ever used (Auburn Penitentiary, NY). It was in the contents of the "Rattlesnake Pete" Gruber museum from Rochester, NY that he had purchased at some point. We used to play in it as kids, which my wife finds is the most cogent explanation of my personality. Can't remember where the chair eventually went, but my grandfather also had the world's largest horse (a Percheron), stuffed and on wheels--also from the Rattlesnake Pete collection.
Where is that Piss Christ guy when he is finally, finally relevant to the world of art?
Hairpinning looks a lot like trepanning.
So long as Napoleon's penis is in a private collection in New Jersey, I have to go with Jeremy Bentham's mummy at the University of London.
DailyArtMagazine.com is an interesting site. I did not know about the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with wombats before. How was that possible? Live and learn.
ColorOurCollections.org is another site. Museums are making coloring books out of items in their collections. Unfortunately, the artwork is so fine that you can't actually color them very well with the usual crayons.
My high school had a two-headed pig fetus in a jar in our science lab.
I'll bet your high school didn't.
My high school had the head of a Japanese soldier, split in half, in the fridge.
tcrosse said...
My high school had the head of a Japanese soldier, split in half, in the fridge.
4/23/20, 1:05 PM
OK, you win.
Two good museums for creepy exhibits are the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD, and the National Museum of Health and Medicine near Washington, DC. The latter has Dan Sickles' leg.
Sickles was a prominent Democrat congressman from New York, infamous for murdering his wife's lover -- Phillip Key, the son son of Francis Scott Key -- in broad daylight across the street from the White House. Sickles was acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity, the first time that defense was ever used (or perhaps the first time it ever resulted in acquittal). When the Civil War broke out Lincoln offered high ranks in volunteer units to prominent Democrats in order to make the Union cause a bipartisan one. Sickles turned out to be pretty decent as a military commander and rose from the rank of colonel to the rank of Major General in command of the III Corps. At Gettysburg he disobeyed orders and moved his troops too far forward, creating a gap in the Union lines that, if Lee or Longstreet had realized it, would have allowed them to destroy the Army of the Potomac. During the ensuing battle a cannon ball struck Sickles on the leg, which had to be amputated. The shattered leg bone, and a cannon ball approximately the size of the one that hit Sickles, are display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. A picture of the display is here.
Creepy enough?
The smalltown RC churches my wife and I visited in Europe in the 70s were full of remains--a lady skeleton in bridal regalia, jewels and all, I recall very vividly.
And there's a chapel at Kutna Hora. C.R. decorated with human bones inside--google ye Sedlec Bone Church.
Narr
Media vitu in morte sumus, y'all
Just a few blocks from here the Museum of Morbid Anatomy existed for a few years. Mostly a repository of odd taxidermy, it was a fascinating and creepy place to spend an afternoon. They gift shop sold monkey penis bone keychains.
D.D. Driver said...
Did you know the Department of Defense operates the National Museum of Health and Medicine? (It used to be called the Army Medical Museum.)
Isn't that the one that supposedly had John Dillinger's freakishly large penis on display?
in the stairwell of the Museum of Science and Industry they had a small Melanesian woman on display who had been sliced into thin sections so you could see all the organs and bones. The sections were in thin cases of plexiglass and hinged to the wall like a book. The cases were filled with formaldehyde, but the worst thing was that a little scum of fat floated at the top, so much for lunch at the museum cafe.
@NorthOfTheOneOhOne
I doubt the DOD would sign off on that one but I guess anything's possible. Anyhow, there was no such exhibit the last time I went 18-20 years ago.
There's a mystery to keep everyone busy til the isolation blows over: Where the hell is Dillinger's penis? Be a good reality show too!
I got Dillinger's penis right here.
Cool, the Huns have a knockoff Jake the Alligator Man.
Gilbert Pinfold's grandfather sounds like a party.
that mummy /// Mummy
Good idea. Las momias in Guanajuato, Mexico.
Burials up in the mountains were very dry affairs. The bodies mummified.
They have been on display for many decades now. They hung right in the corridor that you walked through. But they have been put behind glass cases because too many tourists were pinching off pieces of mummy to take home with them. A piece of Mexico to show the home crowd.
the Electric Chair for our state, complete with electric panel, fume hood, cables, and a box with leather masks ... I held that using it as a fund raiser - $5 for a polaroid (now i'm dating myself) of a visitor sitting in the chair, would certainly help the bottom line was not well accepted. [todd galle]
Don't those Quakers just drive a man crazy? That idea of yours was genius.
At college in D.C. in the 60's, the Army Medical Museum was a cheap date.
I should have included the thing itself. Wiki has pix with a Ray Bradbury anecdote, no less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummies_of_Guanajuato
tcrosse @10:36 AM: Clearly Klimt did not understand Beethoven. Among other things. His depiction reveals the intimidation he felt when confronted with Beethoven's, shall we say, spirit. More of a self-portrait, perhaps.
Gilbert Pinfold @10:38 AM: I know someone who, unwilling to come to terms with her life, intentionally gave herself a megacolon, believing that she would thus be (along with her other self-created health issues) eligible for Medicaid, and not need to work any more. It worked.
She is now in a local Hell's Waiting Room. Apparently, for her, it's an improvement.
People can be strange.
Similar to Lincoln, Windsor castle has the ball that killed Nelson.
When I visited Texas for a family reunion last November, I went to the Frontier Texas! museum in Abilene, which deals primarily with the military forts, white settlers and Comanche Indians in the 19th Century. One of the exhibits is a Comanche war drum with three scalps on it.
Speaking of Texas museums, the Lone Star Brewery in San Antonio had the Buckhorn Museum, featuring the 78-point buck, two-headed calves and plenty of other animal oddities.
I think the museum has since moved away from the brewery and closer into town.
I had spent almost 2 entire days at the Deutsches Museum and was mesmerized. It starts at the beginning of prehistoric Germany then through genuine roman artifacts and winds its way all the way up to present times.
The creepiest thing I saw (besides the exhibit in this post) was a plaster model of holocaust victims marching into underground "showers". 2 Exhibits over they had original plaster models of Hitler's Germania with oversized dome of the new Reichs VolksHalle. Yeesh. That was creepy.
Did Biden sniff that hair bun? That would make it 98% more creepy, and he could have actually done it while she was alive.
The A-bomb memorial in Hiroshima used to have creepy charred/melted mannequins in the museum when I visited but I think they retired that particular exhibit.
Images still available on Google though.
As a Philly resident, the Mutter Museum is by far the creepiest place. At the U Penn museum, They have a mummified cat. My sister, a CAT Scan tech at U Penn hospital, scanned it. They originally thought it was a baby in all the wrappings, they got a shock when the scan was viewed.
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