Essay about the Perot Museum in Dallas Tx.

THE PEROT MUSEUM
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Thesis: Context has a significant effect on the experience of art. Viewing artwork in a museum is a different experience from viewing it on a book, magazine or digital media.
The Perot Museum displays various works of art and science aimed at inspiring the minds of innovative visitors and life-long learners. Some of the artwork includes Animals inside out by Dr. Gunther von Hagens and the Plastiki designed by Andrew Dovell.
The intentions of the creator of Animals Inside Out are unclear. This display was quite morbid. Animals Inside Out was a display of skinned and sliced animals with most of their internal body organs missing. The view was mostly unsettling but hard to ignore. The giraffe for instance was posed around 10 to 11 feet above the normal adult’s height. It was skinned and somehow the artist managed to keep the muscle structure of this animal completely untouched. Although this display was grotesque, the amount of detail was awe inspiring (Lima, 2006). These animals had been sourced from a three month safari in Africa’s jungles. Another exquisite piece was the two-hump camel which had been sliced with its head flayed. It was positioned to display all of its insides including the intestines. These animals had maintained their physique through a preservation process known as plastination. This process was developed by Dr. Gunther von Hagens in 1977. It involved replacing fats and water in an animal’s body with certain plastics to form specimen that do not smell or decay. This process resulted to the life like structure of these lifeless animals (Von Hagens, 2002).


The Giraffe in Animals Inside Out at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. Retrieved from
There was no question about the intensity of detail in this display. However, the question of whether these specimens were sourced ethically often arose at the back of my mind. Other items that were particularly interesting included blood vessel configurations of various animals including a dog. The anatomic aspects of these animals were presented in very clear quality. It was hard to move away from these peculiar but beautiful presentations. Viewing the Animals Inside Out from the screen of a computer or a phone did little justice to the work that had to be done to get to these specimens. The aspect as seen on the images even those on the museums website didn’t beckon for a second look (Muth, Hesslinger & Carbon, 2015).
The Plastiki on the Plaza on the other hand, was purely a work of art. Most people would argue that it was just a...