‘He made Damien Hirst look like a sideshow’: the bloodsplash horrors of Gunther von Hagens

The German scientist showman turned corpses into gruesome entertainment and scored a global hit – but he sidestepped the moral questions truly great art asks

Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of “plastination”, will be remembered as the man who killed off 1990s shock art. He certainly plastinated any reputation Damien Hirst had as a disturbing artist of mortality.

When this German scientist turned showman made a popular bloodsplash around the world in the latter half of the 90s, Hirst was still pickling sheep, sharks and pigs and displaying them as philosophical specimens. Other artists, too, played with carnality and horror, from endoscopy videos to model landscapes filled with Nazi atrocities. But it was just art. Then along came Von Hagens with his Body Worlds exhibitions, using plastination to perfectly preserve dissected bodies. He did what Hirst and co never dared: he displayed actual human corpses as a kind of grisly but purportedly educational art object.
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