My Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life

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Profane Waste

In collaboration with artist Dana Hoey.

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