The Washington Post has a story about resellers of human bone and the people who buy them: "An artistic body of work's bone of contention."
However, "we sell more bones to artists than we do to science," says Ronald Cauble, who has been running the Bone Room since 1987. "One of our biggest sales was to Damien Hirst," he of the formaldehyde cows and diamond-encrusted platinum skull. Hirst bought that particular skull elsewhere, but Cauble says he sold the artist a whole pile of other bones. "They haven't become any art yet, to our knowledge," Cauble says. "He's renovating his castle, he's sawing things in half, he's doing sharks in formaldehyde. He's busy."
Supplying and replacing osteological materials used for education is a real problem today. Collections made in the early twentieth century are basically irreplaceable, but educational use takes a toll of damage with every academic term. So it's sort of frustrating to read about artists taking bone and grinding it up to make hood ornaments.
