The king of curiosities: New York artist Barton Benes bequeaths his irresistibly weird collection of pop artifacts to a museum in ... North Dakota? (art).

Visit artist Barton Lidice Benes's apartment in New York City's West Village and you may feel you're in a dream. Meticulously organized cabinets brim with macabre and mirth-inducing objects. Stuffed heads of wild animals festoon the walls, bone chips of Catholic saints hang in the kitchen, and on Benes's worktable the gallstones of actor Larry Hagman are proudly played near a straw used by Lewinsky. If what you see isn't enough, consider this: At Benes's death, this whole apartment is headed for a museum in North Dakota.

"Living in my apartment is like living in a 17th-century curio cabinet," says Benes, a 59-year-old maker of modern relics whose work has been attacked in British tabloids and featured on the cover of ARTnews. "I've been fascinated by relics ever since I took a monk's bone from the catacombs in Rome in 1963."

He's been busy. His 850-square-foot apartment is crammed with thousands of artifacts, including a statue of the Virgin Mary created by Benes from dollar bills, numerous African carvings, and a mummified Egyptian catfish that he says "smells like bouillon."

Benes has been HIV-positive since 1986 and suffers from emphysema This past spring, after a period of ill health, he made arrangements with the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, whose curators will videotape, document, and measure everything to re-create his apartment in their museum on the American Great Plains.

But why is Benes donating his life's work to a museum in North Dakota? The story begins in 1993, when Benes created "Lethal Weapons," a highly controversial exhibit made up of 30 artworks filled with his own blood, including a Molotov cocktail, a water pistol, and a perfume atomizer. The show opened in Lund, Sweden, after government health officials had forced Benes to heat the artworks at a temperature of 160 degrees in a hospital oven to make them safe for public viewing. "Lethal Weapons" ...