[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Kill-Dick.jpg?w=504″]<\/p>\n
\n\tBefore you even begin reading Luke Goebel\u2019s Kill Dick<\/em>, there are clues that it\u2019s going to be a wild ride. Blurbs on the back cover are attributed to Anna Delvey, the socialite-scammer, and to Ottessa Moshfegh of My Year of Rest and Relaxation <\/em>fame\u2014also, the author\u2019s wife. Moshfegh says, \u201cIf this book were any better, I\u2019d cut my own head off.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe novel satirizes the art world and its thorny relationship to the Sackler family, those opioid-peddling philanthropists described here, in fictional form, as \u201cgenocidal maniacs\u201d and \u201cart snobs.\u201d Its titular antagonist, Dick Sickler, is effectively the Sackler patriarch. The book opens with not one but three epigraphs from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/em>, and its title reads as a rejoinder to Chris Kraus\u2019s art-novel sensation I Love Dick<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tDing dong, now Dick is dead.<\/p>\n \n\tImagine a novel written in the style of Vice<\/em> magazine. That\u2019s Kill Dick<\/em>: every sentence strains to shock with its edginess or searing, cooler-than-you cultural critique. It drops the names of fashion brands and hot young L.A. artists\u2014Jill Mulleady, Tala Madani\u2014that you\u2019re expected to recognize, or else this book is not for you. It swings from dad-joke one-liners (\u201cSociety was curing homeliness if not homelessness\u201d) to teen-boy humor (\u201cHer pussy probably tasted like Diet Coke\u201d).<\/p>\n \n\tWhen so many salacious sentences pile up\u2014detailed descriptions of opioid-induced constipation, nihilistic wisecracks\u2014you might feel inundated, but soon you\u2019re inured. Chaos accumulates so consistently that it becomes baseline. The style mirrors the narrator\u2019s emotional state: Susie, our protagonist, is addicted to Oxy and numb to the world. Her sentences are blunt because she\u2019s emotionally blunted. Chapters switch between first and third person as she dissociates, or else when she decides that the confessional mode is so earnest that it\u2019s cringe.<\/p>\n \n\tSusie is numbing herself not just to her own life but to the chaos that is America in the 21st century. The climate is collapsing, addicts are dying on Skid Row, and an election looms. It is 2016, and an Orange Candidate is facing off against a woman (this novel\u2019s veil is thin). Like the chaotic sentences, political turmoil is so constant as to feel unremarkable. \u201cThere was so much that needed protesting in America,\u201d Susie thinks, \u201cthat people had gone numb, and posting online was about as effective as talking to yourself in the shower.\u201d She is \u201canti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-end-stage-capitalist\u2014even as a child of fortune\u2014but mostly anti-labels.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMore than anything, Susie hates her dad\u2014Dick Sickler\u2019s lawyer, the one who helped him get away with murder and made big money doing it. Together, Dick and daddy targeted \u201ccoal miners and poverty slaves [with] tablets of heroin,\u201d later hooking white-collar workers with back pain and expensive ergonomic chairs. Susie\u2019s father convinced the courts that the Sicklers hadn\u2019t known Oxy was addictive until it was too late, even though his own wife\u2014Susie\u2019s Mom\u2014had been addicted at the time. Now, mom is in a sex cult, the Church of the White Illumination, along with Dick. Their masked balls are pulled straight out of Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat is the ultimate rich-girl rebellion when your dad is Dick Sickler\u2019s lawyer? Getting hooked on Oxy, obviously. Dad dismisses over half a million opioid deaths as \u201cuseless drug addicts\u2026 losers who would have merely found something else to kill them,\u201d and Susie hates him for his lack of remorse, for being a loser who doesn\u2019t know \u201cthe difference between Ray Charles and Charles Ray.\u201d She\u2019s a vegan who would \u201cnever hurt a living creature\u201d\u2014except her dad, emotionally.<\/p>\n \n\tSusie also takes pills with a professor\u2014Phil Krolik, a decent guy\u2014before dropping out of NYU. Both are disillusioned with New York\u2019s careerism and liberal groupthink and wind up drifting to LA. Susie can\u2019t be bothered to clamor and stress for what, an internship at PS1? Instead she seeks profundity by doing drugs by the pool after her roommate is found dead of an overdose, her hair chopped off and strewn around the room. High on a lounge chair, she recalls Phil\u2019s professorial profundities, but they segue into stoner thoughts. She finds she can\u2019t quite remember whether a particular bit of wisdom is attributable to Einstein or Epstein.<\/p>\n \n\tPhil, meanwhile, grows tired of lecturing about Marxism and melting ice caps to bored, wealthy undergrads who are staring at their phones. He wants to actually do something\u2014something more than applying Rogaine and retinol to stave off his midlife crisis. He opens a rehab clinic that functions more like housing, since residents are hardly detoxing, but instead cycling between red pills and blue pills, a wink to Matrix-inspired party politics internet speak.<\/p>\n \n\tThere is something strange about the opioid deaths of late: addicts on both coasts turn up not just dead but dismembered. It gets freakier than Susie\u2019s roommate\u2019s posthumous haircut: sometimes eyelids are swapped with nipples. The culprit earns the nickname \u201cthe Pain Killer,\u201d but it\u2019s unclear whether they\u2019re a murderer or a vigilante. Plausibly, the addicts overdosed all on their own and the Pain Killer intervened only to make sure their death made the news.<\/p>\n Kill Dick<\/em> is a book about performative politics, virtue signaling, and image obsession. Royal-Lee, the drug dealer, parodies Gen Z: obsessed with looking sexy, disturbed by actual sex. Both Susie and Phil confuse political action with family drama: Phil hopes his rehab will help him find his twin brother, who became addicted to opiods after breaking his back in basic training and eventually went MIA. Susie decides to declare war on Big Pharma\u2014but really, on her dad. Drugs insulate Susie and Phil emotionally; wealth insulates them materially. Neither votes, dismissing it as pointless, citing the \u201cillusion of power\u201d granted by the electoral college.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tInstead of voting, Susie comes up with an idea for an art project: she turns Skid Row into an installation, tagging tents to make it look like the Sacklers are its corporate sponsors. The crass maneuver makes her famous\u2014or at least, gets her press. She\u2019s proud to be in the paper alongside news of protests at the Dakota pipelines, of Obama\u2019s $38 billion deal with Netanyahu, of Angelina Jolie\u2019s divorce. A dead body winds up in one of the tents; she didn\u2019t put it there, but she\u2019s not mad about how it makes the project feel so much more real, more transgressive. Soon, she\u2019s imagining not changed lives but a glamorous future in the art world\u2014dinners with Alex Israel and China Chow.<\/p>\n \n\tThe art world is the epitome of confusing symbolic grandstanding for actual change. But it is hardly the only guilty party. There\u2019s also, for instance, the Democratic party\u2014which Goebel describes as \u201closer liberals, distracted by race, gender, sexuality\u2014any category of victimhood the DNC could weaponize\u2014while the party kept dodging holding pharma responsible, ending genocidal war\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tStill, Kill Dick<\/em>\u2019s main target is the low hanging fruit that is art-washed hypocrisy\u2014which the Sacklers symbolize, funding loosely lefty art exhibitions with blood money. But the book leaves out the part of the art world Sackler story that involved effective organizing, mentioning the photographer and activist Nan Goldin briefly but only as \u201can enemy of The Church\u201d (Referring to the sex cult, not a Christian congregation). It\u2019s worth remembering, lest Kill Dick<\/em>\u2019s nihilism get you down, that when Goldin and her group P.A.I.N. staged die-ins\u00a0art institutions, they succeeded in getting the Sackler name removed from many museum walls and bringing plenty of shame to the family name, leaving the pill-peddling philanthropists largely cut off from the forces that once laundered their reputation. While Goebel understandably struggles to imagine what meaningful action would look like, Goldin has in fact already shown us\u2014even if the acknowledgements were too little too late.<\/p>\n \n\tThis familiar posture plagues art world satire: It\u2019s easy to turn up your nose at all of art\u2019s issues, but fail to deal honestly with why you\u2019re drawn to art at all despite them. It is easy to say what you are against, and harder to say what you are for, if anything.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd it\u2019s always odd when a work of art is guilty of the precise thing that it critiques. Our narrator disses \u201cironic wannabe edgelords,\u201d which is also how I\u2019d describe Kill Dick<\/em>. Like Phil\u2019s lectures and Susie\u2019s artworks, the novel is ostensibly \u201cabout\u201d politics, yet proves most adept at cloying for attention. And it\u2019s hard to look away from the trainwreck that is Kill Dick<\/em>, though its hypocrisy does grate.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile the novel spends most of its pages avoiding earnestness and sincerity like the plague\u2014\u201cBetter a Tim Hawkinson than an Anselm Kiefer,\u201d Goebel quips\u2014the ending allows a sliver of something like hope to surface, Luigi Mangione-style. I won\u2019t spoil it. All I\u2019ll say is that the book falls squarely in the category of \u201cchaotic neutral\u201d in every way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/kill-dick-luke-goebel-otessa-moshfegh-1234778828\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Kill-Dick.jpg?w=504″] Before you even begin reading Luke Goebel\u2019s Kill Dick, there are clues that it\u2019s going to be a wild ride. Blurbs on the back cover are attributed to Anna Delvey, the socialite-scammer, and to Ottessa Moshfegh of My Year of Rest and Relaxation fame\u2014also, the author\u2019s wife. Moshfegh says, \u201cIf this book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1860785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1860785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1860785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1860785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1860785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}