Skulls-R-Us

Happy Holidays from the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia
Skull Wreath by Noah Scalin


Once you start looking, you see skulls everywhere, says Noah Scalin, the graphic artist who gave himself the task of making and posting a new skull every day on his blog for a year. Within a few months, his skull-a-day blog had hundreds of thousands of hits. His inventive variation on a theme resonated with people around the world. A publisher eventually came calling, and the project has been reborn as a book.

As Scalin points out in an interview with Robert Hicks, intrepid director of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the "memento mori" is a time-honored reminder that our days are numbered. Scalin found that staring at skulls every day made him want to celebrate life.

Hicks has begun posting videocasts with authors he invites to speak at the museum on the Mütter's website. The site makes the Mütter look like a fun place. Not many other museum shops would offer a skull wreath as a cheery holiday gift idea. But then, how many museum directors get to refer to their collections as "Skulls-R-Us?"

Find all of Dr. Hicks' videocasts here, at on the museum's Youtube channel.

Dave Hickey on the Line

In one of his regular columns for Art in America, the glossy international review that bills itself as "the world's premier art magazine," Dave Hickey crams Joe Cocker, a waspish art critic from a '40s noir film, Wilson Pickett singing In The Midnight Hour, Caravaggio, Andy Warhol, a new theory about the unconscious, and his own bifurcated psyche into the Stax recording studio in Memphis, circa 1965.

And "Lawd have mercy!" as Pickett would shout, by the time you meet up with all the cool characters, rocking tunes and renegade ideas that Hickey whips into that box, you forget you're reading a sniffy art mag — and maybe even that Hickey's just told you he's the most famous art critic in the world — and start having fun.

Hickey always has fun, or else he's outta here. Even writing is fun for him: "Well of course it is, otherwise I wouldn't DO it." His high-flown, down to earth, scurrilous, gorgeous, heart-breakingly serious, hilarious prose has made him famous. Along with his gift, lyrical sentences notwithstanding, for ticking people off.

Here, for example, is Hickey accepting a compliment about his work: "I regard myself as a serious intellectual person, but I don’t care if intellectuals like what I’ve written. I’m that arrogant. What do I care about the praise of idiots?"

I was, understandably, a little nervous about phoning him for a small article slated for a magazine hailing from the place he's said he couldn't wait to see in the rear-view mirror. Being an idiot myself, the first thing I did was praise his writing to the skies. He was gracious, funny and more than patient. When I apologized for keeping him for over an hour, he shrugged it off with, "It's your dime."

It was Skype, actually, and I kept the camera firmly turned off, grateful that the man who makes his living from "tearing stuff down" couldn't see me.