Thanks For Describing It As “Prosciutto” And Not, Say, “Mongolian Beef”

They couldn’t shut ’em down in Tampa, and it remains to be seen whether allegations, er, oblique suggestions that the specimens may have been acquired in an, er, uh, unethical manner will deep six the cadaver show at the South Street Seaport:

The jaunty fellow with the conductor’s baton waving in one hand stands on a pedestal seemingly lost in the music. But there are a few startlingly odd things about this tall, lithe gentleman: He is dead, his skin has been methodically ripped away and there is a pinkish void where his viscera are supposed to be. Besides a few supporting segments of muscle, bone and ligament, the man has been rendered into a web of white spindly nerves.

It is impossible to know what he did in life, but in death the man has become a ghoulish show-and-tell exemplar of the human nervous system, part of a new exhibit that opens tomorrow at the South Street Seaport. The show, called “Bodies . . . the Exhibition,” features the preserved remains of 22 people and 260 other specimens, including a set of conjoined fetuses, a set of male genitalia, a pudgy woman who has been vertically sliced into four equal segments and a sprinter whose flayed muscles fly around him like slices of prosciutto.

(“Slices of prosciutto” . . . almost Gopnikian, that!)

The problem is where they got the cadavers from — in this case, China:

While the notion of displaying the dead for profit is bound to provoke controversy, some critics say this particular show, which relies entirely on cadavers from China, is more troubling than those sponsored by other companies that have gotten into the macabre business of anatomical exhibitions. Citing the Chinese government’s poor human rights record and the medical establishment’s practice of recycling the organs of executed prisoners, medical ethicists and human rights advocates are questioning whether the show’s specimens were legally obtained.

“Given the government’s track record on the treatment of prisoners, I find this exhibit deeply problematic,” said Sharon Hom, the executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China.

Arnie Geller, the president of Premier Exhibitions Inc., the company that spent $25 million to obtain the specimens from a Chinese university, insists that the human remains, all but two of them male, are those of the poor, the unclaimed or the unidentified. Although he said he was not allowed to keep copies of documents, officials at Dalian University in northern China showed him papers attesting to the origin of the remains. The documents were kept confidential, Mr. Geller said, because international law forbids public disclosure of the identities of those who have donated their bodies to medical science.

“I am certain that all these specimens were legally obtained,” he said.

But Harry Wu, the executive director of the LaoGai Research Foundation, an organization that documents abuses in China’s penal system, said officials from Dalian University had been previously implicated in the use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes, having supplied bodies to Gunter von Hagens, the German entrepreneur who started the first traveling show of the dead, “World of Bodies.” Dr. Sui Hongjin, who was previously Mr. Von Hagen’s Chinese partner until a falling out three years ago, is now working with Premier Exhibitions, which has its headquarters in Atlanta.

“Considering that China executes between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners a year and their long history of freely using death row prisoners for medical purposes, you have to wonder,” Mr. Wu said, adding that he would pursue legal steps in this country to ensure that the show was not using illegally obtained bodies. “In China, a piece of paper means nothing.”

Of course, the Times is smart, and they freely admit this could be a stunt (a Drudge-tastic one, at that):

If the past is any guide, such controversy coupled with public hand-wringing over the show’s ghastliness is fully expected, even welcomed, by its sponsors. A publicly traded company that has prospered by exhibiting relics from the Titanic, Premier is clearly hoping news coverage will help draw enough people, at $24.50 for adults and $18.50 for children, to earn back its sizable investment.

. . .

A smaller show the company organized last summer in Tampa, Fla., provoked condemnation from religious leaders, a state medical board and the state attorney general (who could not find a reason to shut it down). That exhibition has been drawing huge crowds.

Gates Material Now Plastic Picket Fences

The Post reports that, true to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s word, the plastic material in the Gates frame supports has been recycled — as picket fences that will be sold to home owners in the midwest, southeast and Canada:

Seven months after the towering orange frames that lined the walkways of Central Park came down, they’ve been reborn as white fence posts framing yards across the United States and Canada.

The project’s path from high-concept art in the Big Apple to unrecognizable fencing in Anytown, U.S.A., began on Feb. 27, when artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude began taking down the 7,500 gates that had filled the park with orange — and an estimated 4 million visitors.

. . .

First off, the disassembled artwork was shipped to a Queens warehouse.

Then the vinyl and nylon were shipped to Nicos Polymers & Grinding Inc. in Nazareth, Pa.

While the fabric was shredded and respun, making it untraceable, the framing, which was the bulk of the project, was ground down into 500,000 pounds of hard-to-hide bright orange vinyl chips.

. . .

The metal parts ended up with Hugo Neu, whose Jersey City scrap yard handles all of New York’s recyclable metal. There it was melted down and sold all over the world.

Nicos soon found a buyer for those blindingly orange chips in Plastival Inc., a major manufacturer of vinyl railing, fencing and synthetic lumber.

What was left of “The Gates” was remade at the company’s Chicago factory into fencing.

The company mixed the orange with white vinyl. What they ended up with were fence posts that are white on the outside, but with a bright orange core.

“Anyone who bought this would have no idea, unless they looked inside the posts,” said Plastival CEO Guy David.

Plastival sells its product, at roughly $100 a 6-by-6-foot panel, primarily through construction-supply chains including Lowe’s in the Southeast, Menards in the Midwest, and Home Depot in Canada.

Too Much Disposable Income!

In case we needed another example of why the superrich have too much disposable income, producers announced plans to turn Adam Sandler’s “The Wedding Singer” into a Broadway musical. For once, the Times is appropriately snarky:

In the history of Broadway, it is the names of composers that echo in the ether: Cole Porter. Stephen Sondheim. And now, Adam Sandler.

That’s right. If all goes forward as planned, Mr. Sandler, the star of popular teenage films like “The Waterboy” and “Billy Madison” and the composer of the holiday-themed “Hanukkah Song,” will soon be represented on the Great White Way in a new musical version of his 1998 movie, “The Wedding Singer.”

The producers of the show, including Margo Lion (“Hairspray”), said yesterday that they planned to open the show on Broadway next April after a tryout run at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle. And while Mr. Sandler’s exact role is still being worked out, Ms. Lion said that two of the film’s original songs, composed by Mr. Sandler with Tim Herlihy, will be part of the stage version.

Ms. Lion, who hit gold with “Hairspray,” set in 1960’s Baltimore, said she suspected that “The Wedding Singer,” set in 1980’s New Jersey, would touch a similar chord with audiences.

“The real appeal of this was that like ‘Hairspray,’ it takes place in a very specific time and place,” she said. “Plus, we can finally say we’re doing a show for all the good people who live in New Jersey.”

A surprise hit on screen, “The Wedding Singer” tells the story of a brokenhearted, mullet-headed crooner (played in the film by Mr. Sandler) who falls for a woman who already has a fiancé. Much hilarity ensues.

Closing the Tab

Now that the (insert Dr. Evil voice) $21 million worth of Gates are being dismantled (they are, aren’t they?), some are questioning the project’s opaque accounting:

One million square feet of nylon fabric. Five thousand tons of steel. Sixty miles of vinyl tubing. Lots of nuts and bolts.

And a $21 million price tag.

Along with the lofty questions posed by “The Gates” (Is it art? What is art? And haven’t we heard enough of this project?), another query has flitted through the minds of some visitors to Central Park in recent weeks. How did the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude manage to spend that much money on their tangerine dream?

To pose the question out loud smacks of ingratitude, particularly given what is widely viewed as the project’s benefit to the city: drawing thousands of foreign tourists and pumping an estimated $254 million into New York’s economy. And the artists have paid for the project entirely on their own, using no public or corporate money, and therefore do not need to justify their expenses. They financed “The Gates” by selling other pieces of their own artwork, which their associates say increased in value over the past year as anticipation for the Central Park project grew.

On the other hand, it is that unique financing system, of relying on the promise of “The Gates” to maximize the profits needed to pay its $21 million bill, that poses the question of how the bill was determined. And while Christo and Jeanne-Claude have freely volunteered the project’s high cost, they steadfastly refuse to explain how they came to that figure.

Despite their reticence, or perhaps because of it, the question has taken root in the usual places. On the Internet, bloggers have calculated the probable prices of extruded vinyl and rip-stop nylon, but have come up millions of dollars short. Journalists have pestered the artists’ representatives to break down the costs, to no avail.

A New York filmmaker who dared to dissect the $21 million figure on his Web site was savaged in an anonymous e-mail message, which included a suspiciously European-sounding putdown: “You ridiculous apprentice of nothing!”

Using New York’s public spaces as a sort of outdoor gallery always increases an artist’s value, but if the Gates accounting is wrong, doesn’t it mean that it’s also possible that they actually made a buttload of money off of the project? Or am I reading this incorrectly?

Bonus Point: That “suspiciously European-souding” commenter’s story.

The Gates: Bonus Coverage

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger noticed that the Gates are still up (they’re being taken down s l o w l y) and checked in with critical bonus coverage:

I saw The Gates a week ago from a window on the edge of the Park, and they looked unimpressive. This past Monday, after a doctor’s appointment near the Park, I walked over for a better look. For sure, my experience of The Gates was unusual. The event had “closed” on Sunday, but it was still up.

As happens in February, the Park was bare, cold and gray. There was some snow, the trees and pieces of green. The apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue stood as they always do in winter–immutably concrete, like the grand, drab facings of inactive hydroelectric dams. The Park was quiet and almost deserted–except for The Gates.

If one opened one’s mind just a crack, it was hard not to be touched by them, and lifted.

The Gates had dignity. They stood still, moving just a little, like the leafless trees. The trees didn’t seem to mind their brief companions. Indeed, they tamed The Gates. Like this: Across a glade, rising to the clock tower by the Metropolitan Museum, the branches of the trees broke down The Gates’ stolid rectangles into glimpsed, cracked shapes of the branches’ choosing. Many people thought The Gates were made for walking through. I thought they were made for standing and staring, turning, and staring again. Amid bleak February it was hard there in the orange-tinged Park not to feel, well, happy.

Writing in this space recently, I suggested that a world made too fast by computers and too harsh by 24-hour news more than anything needed its artists and architects to provide it with respite, rather than the emotional or visual pistol-whipping of too much recent art. I do understand that Olmsted’s Park is self-sufficient solace. But by my definition, Christo’s Gates qualified.

Even though Henninger enjoys the occasional “knee-jerk kick against hype’s fat backside” (note this glorious phrase for further use!), he found the Gates palatable:

Walking earlier this week in Central Park among the 7,500 cookie-cut “Gates” of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, my thoughts turned to Ed Banfield. Edward Banfield was a famous government professor at Harvard with zero tolerance for conventional wisdom. He was known for his unusual insights into the political and social life of cities, but in 1982 he upended the art establishment with an article in Harper’s titled, “Art Versus Collectibles: Why museums should be stuffed with fakes.” Stuffed with fakes?

Citing Picasso’s “Girl With Mandolin,” then valued at $2 million, Ed Banfield argued that nearly all of that claimed “value” was about scarcity and investment, while most of the work’s aesthetic appreciation could be had with a high-quality $850 reproduction. He proposed widely distributing the pleasure of Picasso’s painting “for only $850,” thereby giving most museums “$1,999,150 left over to purchase other sources of aesthetic satisfaction.” Needless to say, a Sistine Chapel’s worth of art-world rage fell on Banfield’s head.

Ed Banfield would have relished what has been loosed from The Gates of Central Park.

For 16 days, the masses flowed through and around Central Park’s 843 acres to see 7,500 replicates of what some called “art” and others “totalitarianism” or “defacement.” On the first weekend, 800,000 people showed up, about 790,000 more than show up at the upscale art galleries downtown on Saturday. A friend arriving from California that Sunday reported the airport aflutter with out-of-towners flying in for The Gates. Ultimately millions came.

Once out of The Gates, however, many headed for more–at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the newly upgraded Museum of Modern Art and the New York Historical Society. I assume nearly all those people thought the experience to be had in the museums was more or less the same as they’d just had among the waving saffron flaps in Central Park. How bad can this be?