Paul Thek – The Tomb (1967) “Officially Paul Thek died in 1988, but really he died twice. In 1967 he conceived The Tomb (frequently called Death of a Hippie) – the summation of a decade, a cultural ethos, and a career. It was the piece he never lived down and never lived up to. Thek became the unwilling prophet of the failure of counterculture idealism and could not regain the tragicomic intensity of The Tomb or his Technological Reliquaries, wax sculptures of raw meat and body parts encased within vitrines.” “The Tomb consisted of a one-story-high, pale pink structure reminiscent of a Sumerian ziggurat, within which lay a full-size, painstakingly crafted effigy of Thek himself. Painted pale pink, the replicant…