"Taxidermy is a very homogeneous field. It’s very, very white and very, very straight."

Said Divya Anantharaman, who's "not either of those things," quoted in "How a Taxidermist Spends Sundays/For Divya Anantharaman, who runs a taxidermy business in Brooklyn, regular manicures are part of the job" (NYT).

Mx. Anantharaman sees the art form as a way to help people connect with nature, to experience “that moment of stillness, of vulnerability and enchantment” — even in an urban environment. 

Taxidermy “shows you that bodies are not fixed and finite — they’re very liminal,” they said. “Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be.” Mx. Anantharaman, 40, lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with their partner and four cats: Fugazi, Garfield, Mani and Junior.

Oh, that reminds me: The New York Times is disbanding its sports department:

"The Capitol complex is a place where Americans can go to watch their representatives, to speak with those representatives, to petition for the redress of grievances."

"The building and its grounds also are part of the fabric of the city. Streams of bikers pass through on morning and evening commutes. Tourists gather for concerts on the lawn. When it snows, the front face of Capitol Hill becomes a popular sledding spot, with neighborhood children sometimes transforming discarded protest signs into makeshift sleds. This is not just an amenity for neighbors and visitors. It is the tangible manifestation of the idea that the government is a part of American life, rather than something separate and apart." 

From "The Capitol Attack Was a Failure of Policing, Not Architecture/Building a permanent fence around the Capitol is not the right approach" by the Editorial Board of the NYT. 

They're reacting to the statement by the acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman: "In light of recent events, I can unequivocally say that vast improvements to the physical security infrastructure must be made to include permanent fencing...." 

The NYT description of the Capitol grounds makes me think of our state capitol grounds here in Madison. Such an important gathering spot. To lose it to fencing would sacrifice a lot and send a terrible message about the accessibility of government and the ineffectuality of the police. It feels like giving up.

But, you know, you used to be able to walk around on the White House lawn. From a 2014 WaPo article:

They've covered the popular "Lion Attacking a Dromedary” diorama at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh — do you see why?

Here's the article in USA Today: 

The museum’s interim director says the scene... has disturbed some because it depicts violence against a man described as an Arab courier.

Wait! Is the human figure a taxidermied human being?! 

The director, Stephen Tonsor, also says recent X-rays showed that the 1860s-era taxidermy was performed with real human bones from an unknown person. Tonsor says the museum’s ethics policy requires that any human remains respect the person’s cultural traditions and be done with permission “of the people whose remains are displayed.”

I replaced the dramatically lit photo from the newspaper with the Creative Commons image at Wikipedia (by Mike Steele), which shows the human figure much more clearly. Let's read more detail at Wikipedia:

"Under current case law, he has no case. Under New York law, you better put your blinds down. He’s lucky he wasn’t standing there buck naked."

Said a lawyer quoted in "Alex Rodriguez may have a tough time pursuing legal action over viral toilet pic" (NY Post). The photograph — taken of the retired baseball star when he was sitting on the toilet (which the NYT Post calls "turd base") was taken from the window of a Park Avenue office building that has a view into his apartment (where he lives with Jennifer Lopez).

I remember blogging about the case the lawyer is referring to. There was an art photographer who'd caught images of people through windows. Ah, yes, here's the old post, from 2013:

"But maybe he should have asked before the gallery opens. Everybody’s talking about it."

Well, if "everybody's talking about it," then the artist made a great decision.

[T]he residents of a glass-walled luxury residential building across the street had no idea they were being photographed and never consented to being subjects for the works of art that are now on display — and for sale — in a Manhattan gallery.

Key word: luxury.

A middle-class value — privacy — is challenged. But it's built into the scheme that only the rich have had their privacy invaded. The artist — Arne Svenson — gets his publicity in the major media. And to top it all off:

Svenson’s apartment is directly across the street, just to the south, giving him a clear view of his neighbors by simply looking out his window.

Easiest art project ever.

“For my subjects there is no question of privacy; they are performing behind a transparent scrim on a stage of their own creation with the curtain raised high,” Svenson says in the gallery notes.  “The Neighbors don’t know they are being photographed; I carefully shoot from the shadows of my home into theirs.”

Here, you can see the kinds of images Swenson chose. And here's Denver Post art critic Mark Rinaldi, writing in 2016, after Swenson won a lawsuit with a First Amendment defense:

Like a lot of people, I find Arne Svenson’s photographs deeply offensive.... Maybe it’s because enough time has passed to really consider the psychological damage to the folks whose privacy was stolen. You can’t, for the most part, recognize Svenson’s subjects as individuals, but you understand they’re actual humans and their sense of personal concealment has been wrecked....

Or maybe it’s because two dozen Svenson photos are now staring us in the face at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which has taken the controversial step of legitimizing them as high art....

Is the A-Rod photographer less able to claim First Amendment protection because: 1. The person is identifiable (so the privacy stake is greater), and 2. The photographer probably did not have any high-art aspirations? Or is the A-Rod photographer more deserving of First Amendment protection because: 1. This wasn't commercial photography, 2. A-Rod is a public figure, 3. A-Rod seems to have used the toilet in a bathroom with the blinds open on a window that looked out on lots of windows?

How many people who didn't even want to see a baseball star on the toilet were subjected to that view? At some point, wouldn't office workers be exclaiming I can't believe he uses the toilet right in front of us like that! The viewers might feel offended (or amused) and are they not allowed to memorialize their experience with an iPhone photo that they text around?

ADDED: There's a 2013 New Yorker article about Swenson (the art photographer):

At the "Epic Fail" Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like (though you should put comments on the new Supreme Court nominee in the previous post).

The sculpture is "Catt," by Eva and Franco Mattes (2010), photographed by me at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It is made of a taxidermy cat and bird along with a birdcage and pedestal. I assume the pets died of natural causes. The words "Epic Fail" appear on the image (but are not visible in my photograph).

"Call it hipster or call it art, rogue taxidermy’s popularity in New York and London is making its way to other urban locations in the United States..."

"... where young and creative people have taken to reinventing the centuries-old process of removing and rearranging the skin of a dead animal."

The Washington Post trend-spots.

No mention of the Dead Pals of Sam Sanfillippo. Madison, Wisconsin was so far out ahead of this hipsterism it isn't even funny.

If an open-casket funeral is acceptable, then what's wrong with posing the corpse in a sitting position?

2 recent examples, both in New Orleans:

"Mickey Easterling... causally [sic] sitting on an iron bench, wearing a magnificent hat with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other."

“She's in a Leonardo outfit,” says Sammy Steele who did Mickey’s hair and make-up. “And I actually dressed her tonight for the occasion.... It’s like something out a department store window in New York. On 5th Ave.... This is what she requested.  She's sitting in a garden scenery to depict her back yard. This is what she wanted.  No stone was left unturned for this memorial.”

“She looks wonderful,” says one bystander. “She looks just like Mickey.”

"[Miriam] Burbank’s daughters had a vision and presented it to funeral directors at Charbonnet Funeral Home...."

“They said they didn’t want a traditional religious type service,” Intern Funeral Director Lyelle Bellard said. “That she was just one of those people that just enjoyed life enjoyed living, just enjoyed people.”

Burbank is sitting at a table wearing Saints colors. Her fingernails are even painted black and gold. She’s got her Busch beer and menthol cigarettes....

“When I walked in, I feel like I was in her house and I didn’t hurt so much,” sister Sherline Burbank said. “Because it’s more of her, and it’s like she’s not dead. It’s not like a funeral home. It’s like she’s just in the room with us.”

Is this acceptable?
	I think the dead body should not be on view at all.
	A open-casket funeral is good, but this is undignified, terrible.
	Open-casket funerals help us see the dead as dead, and this is the opposite.
	My opinion is that my opinion is irrelevant. Let the family do what it wants.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: They say nothing is certain but taxes and taxidermy.

"Even in an age when a child’s every irregularity is attributed to a syndrome, the idea of a 'normal weird kid' seems reasonable enough..."

From a long New Yorker "Annals of Psychiatry" piece about Adam Lanza, based on an interview with his father Peter, who said that his son was "Always thinking differently... Just a normal little weird kid."

A supposedly extreme thing about Adam Lanza that doesn't sound at all extreme to me: "He showed such hypersensitivity to physical touch that tags had to be removed from his clothing."

And what if your child showed talent for writing in a manner that seems like those popular slasher films and Stephen King bestsellers?

[In 5th grade], Adam and another boy wrote a story called “The Big Book of Granny,” in which an old woman with a gun in her cane kills wantonly. In the third chapter, Granny and her son want to taxidermy a boy for their mantelpiece. In another chapter, a character called Dora the Berserker says, “I like hurting people. . . . Especially children.” Adam tried to sell copies of the book at school and got in trouble. A couple of years later, according to the state’s attorney’s report, a teacher noted “disturbing” violence in his writing and described him as “intelligent but not normal, with anti-social issues.”

And what if your child really loved the pop culture things from your youth that you showed to him?

When Peter took him to see Bill Cosby live, Adam laughed for an hour straight. He loved reruns of “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Get Smart,” which he would watch with his dad. One Christmas, Adam told his parents that he wanted to use his savings to buy toys for needy children, and Peter took him shopping for them.

Wouldn't you think your child was rather brilliant if you asked what he would do if he had 3 wishes and he said he'd wish "that whatever was granting the wishes would not exist"?

The parents took Adam to a psychiatrist, and the diagnosis was Asperger's Syndrome, which seemed helpful and specific, something they could work with. It made sense to Peter. But:

“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.” Peter and Nancy were confident enough in the Asperger’s diagnosis that they didn’t look for other explanations for Adam’s behavior. In that sense, Asperger’s may have distracted them from whatever else was amiss. “If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,” Peter told me. “But let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird.”

AND:

When he was sixteen, [Adam] found a picture of Karl Marx (huge beard), Lenin (small beard), Stalin (mustache), and Mao (clean-shaven), and sent it around with a caption, “Comrades, we must rectify the faltering facial hair standards.” 

ADDED: It's obvious in retrospect that Adam Lanza needed to be institutionalized. Why didn't his parents do that?! It seems like a cartoon — a horror cartoon — of what happens when a child doesn't have a mother and a father together in his home. The mother seems to have appeased and comforted him constantly. And the fatherly judgment and discipline is exiled. But how much rationality is contained within Peter Lanza? He is responsible for the distance he took from what was a dangerous, hopeless relationship between mother and son. In this New Yorker piece, we get to read the story he's assembled for his semi-peace of mind, after the fact.

Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, she’d say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the situation.”

"Apparently I made an horrific horror-film, but shouldn't a good horror film be horrific?"

"My dear people it is a f****cking MOVIE. It is all fictional. Not real. It is all make-belief. It is art. Give people their own choice to watch it or not. If people can't handle or like my movies they just don't watch them."

Director Tom Six responds to the British Board of Film Classification's ban on "The Human Centipede Part 2 (Full Sequence)."

IN THE COMMENTS: Chip Ahoy said:

You know what else is horrific. This has me completely terrified. I just now looked at photos of Palin's new home in Scottsdale and the whole place is empty except for one exceedingly macabre bit of taxidermy.

"[C]urio cases, taxidermy and other stylish clutter of the Victorian era have been taken up by young hipsters..."

Jeez, I never know what to believe when I'm reading about "hipsters" in the New York Times.

... he saw a young man dressed in a bowler, cape, breeches and knee socks on the Lower East Side.

“We’ve already seen the comeback of the butcher and the baker,” he said. “Next thing is going to be a hipster candlestick maker.”...

Country and city men alike have rediscovered old-school American brands like Filson, Orvis, L. L. Bean and Duluth Pack. Obsolete hobbies like wet-plate photography are finding new enthusiasts; long-outmoded farming practices are being revived. Even deer hunting with old-fashioned muzzleloaded rifles, which have to be loaded with gunpowder, a musket ball and a ramrod, has come back in force in some states.

When I read style pieces like this, the first thing I always think about is The Great Grunge Hoax of 1992. But then, I'm not a hipster. I'm a member of the tom-tom club.

"It's precisely because I respect all life that I did this."

The Boston Globe reports:

A Chinese artist who grafted the head of a human fetus onto the body of a bird has defended his work as art after a Swiss museum withdrew the piece from an exhibit.

"It's precisely because I respect all life that I did this," artist Xiao Yu said Tuesday. He said the bird and fetus "died because there was something wrong with them. ... I thought putting them together like this was a way for them to have another life."

Swiss museum visitor Adrien de Riedmatten, 29, filed a complaint on Monday with the district attorney of Bern, Switzerland, calling for an investigation into the piece, which was on display at the Bern Art Museum....

The work was removed, curator Bernhard Fibicher said Tuesday, because museum directors didn't want the controversy surrounding it to overshadow the rest of the "Mahjong" exhibit, which features avant-garde Chinese works from the last 25 years. The museum is planning an Aug. 22 symposium with artists, philosophers and ethics experts before deciding whether to re-exhibit the piece.

Xiao said he bought the head in 1999 for a few dollars from a man who was cleaning out a scientific exhibition hall. The glass bottle in which it came had a handwritten sticker identifying it as a female specimen from the 1960s. According to Xiao, it had no name or cause of death....

The name of the piece, "Ruan," is a word Xiao invented that combines the Chinese characters for different kinds of animals. Xiao said he added the eyes of a rabbit to the head.

Xiao is known for shocking material. He once paid an assistant $1,200 to sew pairs of living lab mice together at the hip and displayed them in glass bowls.

Well, I hope the the artists, philosophers and ethics experts can figure this one out. I wonder which of the three -- artists, philosophers or ethics experts -- will have the strongest objection and which will be most supportive of Xiao. And while you've got those artists, philosophers and ethics experts assembled, please ask them about the sewn-together mice.

Don't you understand art?

UPDATE: Creative taxidermy is more widespread than you may realize.