Deathworks

Deathworks are Philip Rieff's term for the characteristic productions of anti-culture — objects, performances, and texts that occupy the institutional spaces of high culture (galleries, concert halls, universities, publishing houses) while carrying a payload of dissolution rather than formation. A deathwork is not simply transgressive art or nihilistic expression. It is more specific and more dangerous: a production that uses culture's authority to negate culture's function. The deathwork looks like art, is discussed like art, commands the prices and prestige of art. But it makes no demands on its audience. It challenges no assumptions. It calls no one to account. It offers instead an experience of pure consumption — seamless, frictionless, and empty of the encounter with authority that cultural experience traditionally provided. Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog, ten feet of mirror-polished stainless steel sold for $58.4 million, is the paradigm: technically perfect, institutionally celebrated, and entirely smooth.