[FIPS WAS THERE…] MORBID ANATOMY MUSEUM

I was equally giddy with anticipation and awash in the heebie-fucking-jeebies upon arriving at the newly opened Morbid Anatomy Museum at 424 Third Avenue in Brooklyn. 

The Morbid Anatomy Museum is a new 4,200 square foot non-profit institution dedicated to the celebration and exhibition of artifacts, histories and ideas which fall between the cracks of high and low culture, death and beauty, and disciplinary divides.

I’m not particularly squeamish, nor am I into gory horror movies. I suppose I was anticipating some kind of unflinching look at death, à la HBO’s Six Feet Under. I imagined it was going to be full of brooding sexy types reveling in the painful fact that life is fleeting, making it the new Gowanus dating hotspot---cable television has taught me that existential crises can be a real panty dropper. Everything dies, so Carpe Diem in my drawers, Nathanial Fisher, Jr!

The entry through the first floor bookstore/café feels promising. It’s spacious but otherwise has a typical independent Brooklyn coffee shop vibe, with the added bonus of a substantial collection of books on death, diseases and mourning. I try to mask my enthusiasm for the impending horrors that surely await me on the other side while paying my $10 admission fee to a woman who is apathetically restocking books on the Bubonic Plague or possibly excruciating Syphilitic deaths. Everyone there is completely blasé and I’m just trying to act normal while half expecting that I’m about to see the Elephant Man’s bones.

The Museum is on the second floor of the building, above the bookstore/café. There’s one large exhibition room and a smaller back room containing the library. The current exhibition, The Art of Mourning, will be on display through December 4^th. I’ve moved past the death masks, as well as the freaky shit with hair and I’m checking out the daguerreotypes of dead people when a thoroughly tattooed pink-haired Parisienne staff member approaches me asking if I have any questions. She looks like someone called Central Casting asking for a “Brooklyn museum of dead stuff type, foreign accent is a plus.” Of course, she seems to really know her shit. We speak briefly until she is abruptly interrupted by another Museum patron who I can only assume was having a Victorian mourning emergency.

The Museum’s lecture series looks particularly interesting. If the lectures were done as podcasts, I would absolutely tune in on weeks that “This American Life” doesn’t sufficiently depress me. But I just don’t see myself going back to the Museum for a lecture on Necrophilia, “Future Dead Body Technology,” or a “Fancy Chicken Taxidermy” class.

The second smaller room is a research library where you'll also find cabinets with collections of jars containing various skeletons and remains. The room has an air of normalcy with just a tinge of Crypt Keeper. It’s your mom’s home office, if she replaced her shelf of Precious Moments figurines with unidentifiable pickled fetuses. The taxidermied animals sprinkled throughout the building feel like filler -- carnations in a big bouquet of dead Victorian baby pictures. Frankly, when juxtaposed against images of deceased children, stuffed and mounted woodland creatures become sheer comic relief.

Hey, fun fact! You probably know that in the 19^th century, people hosted viewings of their deceased loved ones in their homes. In the 20th century, we got all caught up in the “hygiene” fad and thought it a nice change of pace to move dead bodies out of our homes just as soon as fucking possible. The deceased were then moved to newly created “funeral parlors”. But did you know that was when the household “parlor” was rebranded as “the LIVING room” aka “no rotting corpses up in here!” Yup, no shit.

We really don’t look death in the face in the same way anymore. And we sure as fuck don’t prop it up on the sofa. Even at open casket funerals, bodies are so oddly overworked that it often feels more like a shitty Madame Tussauds exhibit than an authentic farewell to the beloved. It’s not likely that we’re ever going to revert back to traditional mourning, but whether our current norms are an improvement is debatable. Museum of Morbid Anatomy is a little science, a little art, a little freak show and a giant sack of sad, but definitely worth your time.

Museum hours: Open every day, except Tuesdays & holidays, 12pm to 6pm--- because who the fuck would want to be there after dark?

Museum admission: $10 for adults. Kids under 12 are free, but don’t bring a kid in there who is old enough to form the words "what is that?” unless your parenting skills are pretty fucking advanced or your kid is Wednesday Addams.