THE MOST BORING question in the world is "Is it moral?," followed closely by "Is it art?" Thanks to the Body Worlds exhibit, which opened in Berlin in February and features specially treated human corpses posed into sculptures, precisely these two questions are the subject of hot debate in the German press.

Staged in a converted postal railway station (Postbahnhof am Ostbahnhof) and supported by heavier-then-usual corporate sponsorship, Body Worlds uniquely straddles the line between pop science and pop art. It is the creation of curator-artist-taxidermist Gunther von Hagens, professor of anatomy at the University of Heidelberg and head of its Institute of Plastination. Plastination is a preservation process by which the body's water content is drained and replaced, first by super-chilled acetone, then by plastic. Over decades, von Hagens collected hundreds of corpses from voluntary donors, mostly from China, refining the plastination technique and honing his sculptural skills. The culmination of these scientific and artistic labors is Body Worlds, which has traveled to Vienna, Cologne, Basle, Tokyo and, now, Berlin.

Plastinated cadavers don't decay, but neither do they look especially real. Indeed, they have the texture of those glow-in-the-dark skulls we all had as kids and can be diced up to reveal the body's inner structures the way purely synthetic anatomical models do. In keeping, roughly half of Body Worlds consists of science-museum displays of organs, sinews, and tissues in glass cases. The lessons to be learned from them remain commonplace: smoking is bad for your lungs, cancer ain't no fun, and late-term abortions are pretty dubious. More striking is the other half of the exhibit, anatomical sculptures of whole bodies unraveling in strips or falling apart in graceful, thin slices. They seem to have been inspired by too much time sitting around college dorm rooms, smoking pot and pondering M. C. Escher posters.

Predictably, the exhibit has attracted criticism from various quarters. Objections from the religious community, however, have been moderate: Andreas Nachama, the president of the Jewish Community in Berlin, compared it with the Holocaust, which is, after all, his job, and only a handful of Christian clerics have grumbled about the sanctity of God's Creation and the like. The most persistent hostility has come from the art critics assigned to report on the show. Body Worlds has been trashed in almost every German feuilleton as sensationalist and dilettantish kitsch. Just as predictably, the press's scorn hasn't deterred the public from making up their own minds. The exhibit boasts of attracting more than six million visitors during its previous stops, and thus far, some eight thousand Berliners and tourists a day have shelled out ten bucks to view such early twenty-first-century works of anatomical (sur-)realism as The Chess Player, Muscle Man with his Skeleton, and Reclining Woman in the 8th Month of Pregnancy.

The joke, of course, is that the anatomy professor has -- intentionally or not -- followed the lead of the conceptual art movement. The works in Body Worlds can hardly fail to remind art lovers of Damien Hirst's recent show Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings (which included, among other things, detailed plastic models of human organs), as well as Hirst's formaldehyde shark and chainsawed pigs' heads from 1999's likewise controversial, if not as instructive Sensation exhibit. The aesthetics of ugliness, the interaction of art and technology, and the critique of traditional museum culture are all established components of many critics', curators', and artists' agendas. So if von Hagens is a publicity-hungry dilletante, what is Hirst? The difference is that von Hagens seems to be ingenuous rather than prankish or ironic, an impression encouraged by his art-world-outsider status and scientific credentials, as well as by the marketing strategy behind the exhibit. The subtitle of Body Worlds is "The Real Thing" -- where is Coke among the sponsors? -- and von Hagens describes his mission in the program as one of "enlightenment." No wonder the art crowd hates him. Pedagogical intent and claims to truth are as foreign to large sectors of the art world nowadays as the idea of beauty for its own sake.

On the other hand, von Hagens has achieved a more thorough deconstruction of the institution than all the bohemians combined. His scientific access to cadavers has allowed him to one-up the professional art provocateurs. Shows like Sensation, have attracted a considerable viewing public, but never one as broad or as devoid of elite connoisseurs as von Hagens's millions of mostly-happy customers. As one visitor wrote in the show's "Comments" book, "I don't mind looking at this exhibit, but I'd hate to be part of it." What better reaction could a radical conceptualist want?