Steve’s company, Spur Digital, does most of the online marketing for the Houston Museum of Natural Science and he had highly recommended the Body Worlds 3 exhibit. So I’d been meaning to take Ananya and anyone else in the family interested to the exhibit. Turns out the exhibit is closing this weekend after being here in town for 6 months so I went online yesterday looking for tickets… sold out, sold out, sold out. Almost every timeslot for the exhibit was sold out, except for the night-time showings. What night-time showings?, you ask. Well, it turns out that when demand is high, the HMNS starts exhibiting 24×7 to fulfill as much of the demand as possible. So I wasn’t too excited about it, but I went ahead and bought two tickets for a showing this morning, Sunday, at 5:45 in the morning. I figured I’d get someone to go with me. Well, when morning rolled around, I was up and ready to go but couldn’t manage to get anyone to join me — not Shonali, not Ananya, not my Dad (my Mom actually told me she thought I was crazy… 🙂 ).
I went anyways and it was worth it. The exhibit was a strange and intriguing mixture of science and art. Some might dispute calling what was there ‘art’, but I’d certainly call it that even though it was positioned more as science. I mean, what else can you call it when you take the remains of two humans and a horse and create this:
Or when you take the remains of four humans and put them around a table, making it look like they are playing poker? I suspect that if the exhibit had been positioned as art, it would have upset a lot more people. As it was, I’m sure that at least some people came out of the exhibit offended.
Now the other part that was interesting… Going this morning, I was, in part, simply interested in who else would be attending an exhibit so early in the morning. I figured that I’d be among the few that had signed up for the crazy early morning viewing. I was wrong. The place was packed from wall to wall. There was a dense line of people that inched along through the exhibit. Anyone who thinks Houstonians are an inert bunch that don’t get out and take advantage of the great art, culture, and science that this city has to offer would have changed their minds this morning!