paradise, volume 3: the trash project

The third and final volume of Ken Hollings’ personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics.

In Paradise, Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste.

King Ludwig II of Bavaria, ＂King of Rock ’n’ Roll＂ Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the ＂King of Pop,＂ all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure--even after the money was gone.

In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious, but tragic, self-indulgence. As he notes in his introduction: ＂You have to be in Heaven to see Hell.＂

Ken Hollings is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural theorist based in London and the author of several books including Welcome to Mars, Inferno, and Purgatory. He teaches at the Royal College of Art.