The Necrotic Turn: On Dead Arts and the Afterlife of Creation

The Necrotic Turn: On Dead Arts and the Afterlife of Creation

In the spring of 2026, a curious statistical anomaly rippled through the art world: nearly half of all solo exhibitions at major contemporary art museums in New York were dedicated to artists who were no longer living, a figure that had more than doubled since 2019 . The Museum of Modern Art closed its year with surveys of Wifredo Lam, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ruth Asawa; the Broad in Los Angeles turned its considerable weight behind the late Robert Therrien; and the ICA Miami offered simultaneous postmortem examinations of Joyce Pensato and Richard Hunt . This was not merely a scheduling coincidence, nor simply a function of the long lead times required for institutional programming. This was a cultural phenomenon—a turn toward the dead so pronounced that it demands interpretation.

Robert Smithson famously quipped that museums are tombs . He may have been more prescient than even he imagined. We are witnessing what might be called the necrotic turn in contemporary art, a complex and multifaceted engagement with death that moves far beyond traditional memento mori or the stately progress of art history. Today, the “dead arts” are not merely historical artifacts; they are a vital, contested, and deeply revealing category of contemporary practice. To understand what constitutes a “dead art” in the twenty-first century is to confront three distinct but intertwined phenomena: the institutional preference for deceased artists, the conceptual revival of obsolete forms and damaged objects, and the deeply ambivalent aestheticization of mortality itself.

The Museum as Mausoleum: Institutional Necrophilia

The contemporary museum’s recent gravitation toward dead artists is often framed as a noble act of historical revisionism. Mavis Pusey had never received a major museum survey despite a career rivaling Robert Rauschenberg’s; that such institutional oversight is now being addressed is undeniably a cultural good . Yet the timing and scale of this necrotic preference suggests something more than mere archival diligence. The art world, long accustomed to the cult of the living star—the Koons, the Hirsts, the contemporaries whose every gesture is a market event—has found in the deceased an unexpected refuge.

Consider the peculiar comforts of the dead artist. They will not issue an ill-considered political statement, embarrass the institution with an inflammatory social media post, or demand a radical recontextualization of their work that clashes with curatorial intentions . A deceased artist is politically inert, their oeuvre a closed system that can be safely held up to the light of current events without fear of unpredictable response. In an era where cultural institutions navigate the treacherous waters of social media outrage and partisan backlash, the dead offer a kind of curatorial safety. The Polish artist Elka Krajewska, discussing her Salvage Art Institute, observed that when a work is destroyed, it “somehow disappears physically”—but what she discovered in insurance inventories was a “netherworld” of damaged works, financially worthless but aesthetically unresolved . Similarly, the museum’s embrace of dead artists suggests a desire to work with oeuvres that, like those damaged works, have been removed from the volatility of living artistic production.

Yet this preference reveals a deeper anxiety about the very purpose of contemporary art institutions. They exist, after all, to champion the “most daring” art of their era while simultaneously stoking interest in the history that preceded it . This dual remit becomes increasingly difficult to fulfill when the living artists seem to have lost their way. As one critic observed, contemporary art has become “self-conscious about being aimless” . The dead, by contrast, offer legibility. Midcentury masters working in abstraction and expressionism remain broadly comprehensible to audiences who grew up studying Pollock and Martin. Their works are known quantities, their meanings more or less settled, their market values established. The result is a cultural landscape where the modernists and the boomers remain on top—even from beyond the veil.

Zombie Media and Salvage Art: The New Life of the Dead

Beyond the institutional embrace of deceased artists lies a more literal engagement with what we might call “deadness” as a material condition of art. This phenomenon takes two distinct forms: the repurposing of obsolete media and the aesthetic elevation of damaged objects.

The theorization of “zombie media” by Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka has given conceptual shape to a practice that has long fascinated artists. Working with magic lanterns, mutoscopes, zoetropes, and other obsolete audiovisual devices, contemporary practitioners like Robert Breer, Ken Jacobs, and Zoe Beloff engage in a kind of technological necromancy . Status Quontinuum, a 2021 work by Guido Devadder, exemplifies this approach: a 3D-printed zoetrope film that could not exist without what Hertz and Parikka describe as a “contemporary technological circuit that redistributes temporality” . This is not mere nostalgia or antiquarian interest. It is a form of artistic reanimation that treats obsolete media not as dead but as dormant, carrying within them the potential for new aesthetic life.

The art historian’s distinction between “zombie art” and “dead art” complicates this picture. Zombie art—or salvage art, as Krajewska prefers—refers to artworks that have been damaged beyond repair, deemed a total loss by insurance companies, and removed from the marketplace . These works live on in warehouses, unseen and unappreciated, in a state of aesthetic and financial purgatory. Krajewska’s Salvage Art Institute, which exhibited a Jeff Koons porcelain balloon dog shattered beyond recognition, a Linda Bond drawing smeared by a child’s hand, and a Helmut Dorner triptych missing its third panel, offers a powerful postmortem . These damaged works retain aesthetic value, even if their market value has been annihilated. The question becomes: can an artifact genuinely cease to be art? The Salvage Art Institute suggests that the answer is no—that even in its most abject state, the artwork carries something irreducible.

Christiane Fischer, president of Axa Art Insurance, made a compelling case for this perspective during a panel discussion about the Salvage Art Institute. “Just imagine all the damaged works from Roman times and Greek times,” she said. “If they would have been thrown out, how empty would the Met be?” . This observation reframes the entire enterprise of art historical preservation. What we recognize as the great works of antiquity are, in many cases, precisely the salvage art of their eras—fragments, reconstructions, and compromised objects that have been elevated through time to the status of masterpieces.

Necro-Art: The Materiality of the Corpse

Perhaps the most radical engagement with death in contemporary art is what scholar Jacob Bach Riis terms “Necro-Art”—art made from dead human bodies . This is not representation of death, but its material instantiation. Teresa Margolles’ Vaporizacion, Spring Hurlbut’s Deuil II, and Sally Mann’s What Remains are key examples of a practice that uses actual human remains—body parts, ashes, blood—as aesthetic material . In Western societies, the corpse is “the ultimate abject,” occupying an in-between position that destabilizes the binary oppositions of dead/alive, subject/object, and human/nonhuman . Necro-Art harnesses this destabilizing power not to conceal corpses but to explore the “disintegrating ‘abject’ body.”

The power of Necro-Art lies not in visual representation but in materiality. Through photographic imprinting, sculptural cast molds, and performative formats that incorporate bodily remains, these works carry what Alfred Gell termed the “material agency of the dead” to the viewer . This is a kind of aesthetic realism that operates through direct physical contact—a form of affective materiality that bypasses representation altogether. When you stand before a Margolles work that incorporates the water used to wash corpses in a morgue, you are not looking at death; you are sharing space with its residue.

This practice finds a conceptual parallel in the work of the Russian art-activist collective “the party of the dead.” Since 2017, this group has staged performances that articulate the dead as an aesthetic and political subject, challenging what theorist Vladimir Ogula calls the “necropolice”—an aesthetic order based on the erasure of mortality . In a memorable 2022 performance at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, activists wearing skull masks held signs declaring: “THESE CORPSES ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR THEM” and “THE DEAD DON’T NEED WAR” . The performance deliberately failed to speak as truly dead—a failure that Ogula interprets as productive, affirming death as the “limit of experience” . By trying and failing to speak for the dead, the activists exposed the impossibility of any work of memory legitimately claiming to do justice to those who have perished.

The “party of the dead” builds on the Russian necrorealist tradition of the late Soviet period, which expressed the collapse of ideology through visual representations of death and decay . But where earlier necrorealism maintained a cynical distance from politics, “the party of the dead” treats the dead as a distinct political subject . This is a crucial distinction. The dead, in this formulation, are not merely symbols to be manipulated for political ends, nor are they ghosts or zombies who continue to haunt the living. They are dead—irreducible to anyone other than the dead—and their speech is impossible. Any attempt to speak for them is necessarily a failure, and it is this failure that constitutes the ethical dimension of the performance.

The Tradition of Death in Art

These contemporary practices exist in a long tradition of artistic engagement with mortality. The Danse Macabre tradition, which originated in the frescoes of the Saints-Innocents cemetery in Paris in 1424, codified a visual vocabulary of death that achieved a form of European universality . From Hans Holbein’s engravings to the revival of the genre in the aftermath of World War I, artists have returned again and again to the figure of Death as a subject worthy of sustained aesthetic attention. The thematic vocabulary is remarkably consistent: Memento mori, Vanitas, the Danse Macabre, Sic transit gloria mundi—these tropes persist across centuries, suggesting that the relationship between art and death is not merely historical but ontological .

What distinguishes contemporary engagements with death from these earlier traditions is a shift from representation to materiality. The medieval Danse Macabre depicted death as a figure external to the human, a skeleton or personification who intervenes in human affairs. Contemporary Necro-Art, by contrast, treats death as immanent—not a figure we represent but a material condition we inhabit. This is not a return to the medieval sensibility but a radical departure from it. The corpse is no longer a symbol of mortality but a material reality that carries its own agency. The “dead arts” of today are not merely about death; they are made of death.

Conclusion: The Living and the Dead

What does it mean, then, for an art to be “dead” in the twenty-first century? The answer is more complex than it first appears. There is the dead artist, safely canonized and institutionally embraced, whose work can be exhibited without risk of contemporary complication. There is the damaged artwork, financially worthless but aesthetically unresolved, living on in warehouses like a body in a refrigerated drawer. There is the obsolete technology, reanimated through contemporary practice. And there is the actual corpse, incorporated into the artwork as material rather than subject.

These various forms of deadness share a common feature: they challenge the primacy of the living, breathing artist as the source of aesthetic value. They suggest that art can persist, transform, and even generate new meanings after the death of its creator, after the destruction of its physical form, after the obsolescence of its medium. In this sense, all art is already dead, or at least always already becoming dead. The museum’s recent preference for the deceased, the artist’s fascination with obsolete media, the institutional embrace of salvage art, and the radical materiality of Necro-Art all point toward a recognition that death is not the end of art but one of its most generative conditions.

The dead arts of today are not a sign of cultural decline or institutional cowardice. They are a symptom of a deeper truth: that art, like all human creation, is animated by the very mortality it seeks to transcend. In the end, Robert Smithson was right. Museums are tombs. But tombs, as the Egyptians knew, are also places of resurrection. The dead arts are not dead; they are merely waiting for the right kind of attention, the right kind of reanimation, the right kind of failure to speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.