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Executed Chinese prisoners likely used in UK exhibition (2021)

(www.theartnewspaper.com)
89 points Michelangelo11 | 5 comments | 10 Jul 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.85s | source
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alwa ◴[10 Jul 25 15:33 UTC] No.44522167[source]▶
Bizarre that this category of touring show continues after all these years. It seems like such self-consciously guilty behavior on the part of the organizers: you don’t accidentally end up with human corpses (that you’re selling as entertainment on the basis of being human corpses!).

They came by them somehow. If the nature of someplace’s justice system is that a death sentence comes with a “turned-to-plastic-and-paraded-around-for-selfies” enhancement, so as to trouble the offender’s eternal soul as well as their life, then just.. say that. “They’re ’bad guys’ and we as a company believe that’s what bad guys deserve.” Or even, “we weren’t involved in the circumstances of their death, but we figure if we’d had a chance to ask them they probably would be fine with it.”

As morally repugnant as I find the entire endeavor, I bet it wouldn’t even hurt ticket sales: people in the West have, in the not-so-distant past, treated hangings and beheadings as social occasions.

But like, there’s a right way to do informed consent—why not just do it and say “yeah we did it the obvious way”? Come to think of it… the ambiguity sure is a reliable path to free attention. It wouldn’t be the first marketing strategy to rely on provocation…

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1. MangoToupe ◴[10 Jul 25 15:47 UTC] No.44522311[source]▶
The western scientific community has a pattern of not treating the bodies of the deceased with respect due, often for very questionable value. I used to be ok with this—one of my favorite museums is the Mütter museum—but as time goes on I grow increasingly uncomfortable with the display of human body parts or entire cadavers.

Perhaps we can excuse the use of bodies for collecting genetic samples and learning about the context in death. There are good reasons to even argue against that, but at the bare minimum we could preserve and store these outside the public eye in a modicum of respect for their gift to us.

Here in the US, our largest equivalent problems are the use of bodies of indigenous, enslaved, and convicted-as-criminals for merely museum display. This has no academic or scientific value; just the casual disrespect of the dead.

Even just here in Philadelphia, this problem isn't relegated to the Mütter museum. The Franklin institute regularly uses real bodies, not reproductions. It's not relegated to ancient history, either: the University of Pennsylvania managed to get their hands on the remains of victims of the 1985 police MOVE bombing. Why? How? To what end? Nobody can remember..... thankfully, the university has absolved itself as legally culpable.

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2. dotancohen ◴[10 Jul 25 16:15 UTC] No.44522626[source]▶
This is appalling from beginning to end, I've never heard of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

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3. cryzinger ◴[10 Jul 25 16:21 UTC] No.44522685[source]▶
You might be interested in a recent New Yorker article about the Mütter and the debates about its collection, if you haven't seen it already :)

https://archive.ph/2025.06.23-112139/https://www.newyorker.c...

4. echelon_musk ◴[10 Jul 25 16:22 UTC] No.44522696[source]▶
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42891830
5. lupusreal ◴[10 Jul 25 17:22 UTC] No.44523279[source]▶
> The western scientific community has a pattern of not treating the bodies of the deceased with respect due

Not just human bodies, but living animals as well, and until relatively recently living humans also. Western scientific culture has a utilitarian "ends-justify-the-means" problem, even when the ends are as dubious as testing a new kind of lipstick that is one cent cheaper to produce.