Profane Waste

Jewels buried in a grave, cigarettes smoked in $100 bills, champagne poured into a bathtub…what explains these seemingly perverse and irrational, yet also thrilling, acts?

Gretchen Rubin uses lucid analysis and explosive examples—by Rauschenberg, Jesus, Boesky, Thoreau, Goebbels—to illuminate the workings of an unacknowledged taboo; photographer Dana Hoey presents a series of haunting images that are at once ultra-real and uncanny.

profane waste book cover

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