There's Now an Exhibit That Lets You Smell & Hear Celebrity Deaths

It’s the odd nature of celebrity that once you get famous, your life becomes a public commodity that seemingly belongs to everyone and not just you. And now—thanks to the “Famous Deaths” installation at The Museum of the Image in Breda, Netherlands—that’s true for death, as well.

Developed by Communication and Multimedia Design Breda at the Avans University of the Applied Sciences, Famous Deaths allows you to experience the passing of famous people like Whitney Houston, Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy through smell and sound. If it sounds tasteless, that’s because it is—both literally and figuratively.

International Business Times reports:

Famous Deaths…purports to provide an “innovative way of documentary storytelling” by reconstructing the last moments of a famous person’s death using only sound and scents, which allows you to “experience these portraits more intensely.” Visitors step into a “smell coffin” where they are bombarded with sounds and scents — but no visuals.

Of the Whitney Houston experience, co-creator Frederik Duerinck tells IBT that users “are in the room in the Beverly Hilton Hotel. We hear and smell the room, Whitney filling up the bath, putting the bath oil inside it, going back to eat something, etc. So it is not that you are hearing a voiceover explaining it is purely experiencing being there in the room with her during her last moments.”

For Princess Diana, there will be the sounds of a car crash. For JFK, visitors will “smell the popcorn of the crowd in the street, Jackie’s perfume while she is bending over her husband during this tragic moment.”

If we’re ranking horrifying invasions of a person’s privacy, making their final moments available for public consumption really scores high on that list.