Collecting the dead

Art, antique and ‘aura’ in personal collections of murderabilia

Bibliographic Data

ID15082609
AuthorsJack Denham (0000-0002-2539-8292, Moscow State University of Technologies and Management named after K.G. Razumovskiy, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume25
Issue3
Pages332-347
Publication date2020-07-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMortality (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1357-6275 • E-ISSN: 1469-9885
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13576275.2019.1605985
OpenAlexW2941215921
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited39

Murderabilia (murder-memorabilia) has enjoyed increasing tabloid attention over the past two-decades. It follows a sustained appetite for the consumption or more ‘mainstream’ forms of crime and death-based culture, yet has not been explored in a dedicated academic study. Building on work in this journal that has considered dead criminals, the consumption of corpses more generally, or the way that we ‘play’ with death in popular culture – this paper contributes an ethnography of collectors and collections of death, the dead and murder. It explores the idea that the cultural consumption of crime and death is driven by a desire for visceral, gruesome and violent experiences – and proposes that these desires are accessed, in the case of material objects, through consumptive values of antique, aura and authenticity

Aesthetics · Antique · Archaeology · Art · Aura · Consumption (sociology · Criminology · Dead body · Ethnography · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Popular culture · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access