A skull made of worse decisions

The theoretical question is what you’d do if you found a bag of cocaine on the street. The answer everyone gives involves civic duty and the police. The real answer is considerably messier. Dutch artist Diddo apparently found some, decided neither obvious option applied, and compressed the whole thing into a human skull. The piece is called Ecce Animal—Behold the Animal—which is either the most honest thing anyone’s ever titled an artwork or the most pretentious, probably both at once.

The skull measures 12 by 18 by 22 centimeters. I’ll let you work out the street value. As a formal decision—taking a controlled substance and pressing it into the universal symbol of mortality—it has a logic that grows on you. It’s also the kind of object that becomes something different the longer you look at it, once you start thinking about everyone who handled what’s in it before it became art. Behold the animal, indeed.