Your face is a mess: desecrating David Bowie’s face-as-commodity in ‘Diamond Dogs’

This article references David Bowie’s face as cultural capital in Diamond Dogs: a modernist ‘whole’ work comprised of Bowie’s rock musicality, literature, album cover, stage-show and performative mask. The paper interrogates Chris Rojek on religion and descent and Richard Dyer’s Stars on facial signage asking how celebrity discourse is inscribed within Dogs as anxiety about the artist’s face. The paper finds that Bowie’s fascination with facial desecration risks his celebritisation, yet cements his celebrification.