The Museum of Jurassic Technology was founded two years ago by David Wilson, an artist who designs miniature special effects models for movies and TV. Normally housed on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, the collection comprises a bevy of eccentric artifacts—some redolent of the ultramundane but most of them chortling at the high end of speciousness. The museum is a belated tribute to the batty logic of 19th-century empiricism, whose will to certainty was paralleled by a taste for the grossly unfounded. An introductory slide lecture encourages immediate identification with “the incongruity of

Our sense of the grotesque changes as our relation to the body changes. With so much current discourse focusing on the history of the body, body manipulations, body invaders, and the obsolescence of the body, it is not surprising to see the grotesque becoming a prevalent art form again. This is especially true for photography, whose powers of controlled manipulation have redefined the grotesque for our time. As the evidential veracity of photography has become more and more questionable, many artists have foregrounded photographic manipulation as an “antique” conceit.

Whereas Doug and Mike Starn,