Executed Chinese prisoners likely used in UK exhibition (2021)

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…

i don't think i would object to the category per se -- i could be persuaded to donate my body to such an exhibit especially if they told me they gave me a consent form that was like "here are the possibilities, check the ones that tickle you".

Why donate? They're making money out of that, why wouldn't you demand a payment?

It would make sense to both get payed immediately and have a percentage of the future revenues sent to your family.

Although this opens another can of worms, and seems in general a repulsive business to me.

If the exhibit paid for bodies, instead of relying on donations, then people would complain that they exploit the poor.

Which is not an invalid way of looking at it.