A deeply researched warning about how the digital economy threatens artists' lives and work—the music, writing, and visual art that sustain our souls and societies—from an award-winning essayist and critic There are two stories you hear about earning a living as an artist in the digital age. One comes from Silicon Valley. There's never been a better time to be an artist, it goes. If you've got a laptop, you've got a recording studio. If you've got an iPhone, you've got a movie camera. And if production is cheap, distribution is free: it's called the Internet. Everyone's an artist; just tap your creativity and put your stuff out there. The other comes from artists themselves. Sure, it goes, you can put your stuff out there, but who's going to pay you for it? Everyone is not an artist. Making art takes years of dedication, and that requires a means of support. If things don't change, a lot of art will cease to be sustainable. So which account is true? Since people are still making a living as artists today, how are they managing to do it? William Deresiewicz, a leading critic of the arts and of contemporary culture, set out to answer those questions. Based on interviews with artists of all kinds, The Death of the Artist argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation. If artists were artisans in the Renaissance, bohemians in the nineteenth century, and professionals in the twentieth, a new paradigm is emerging in the digital age, one that is changing our fundamental ideas about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society.

This is the record of the pilgrimage of one great artist, reflected in the experience of one small audience. When Sam Peckinpah died in 1984, I spent some time working out my responses to his work as a whole and, more generally, puzzling over the experience of following contemporary artists as their work takes shape. I ended up lamenting Peckinpah's death, pondering those wonderful movies, and reflecting on what all our watching, reading, and listening amounts to in our living.

The Death of Art evaluates the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's ideas on music, visual arts, and literature and their relevance to today's mass culture. Adorno drew concepts and inspiration from fields such as history, historiography, sociology, musicology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, which he used in his assessments of art. His varied perspectives resulted in writings that offer shocking glimpses into larger cultural issues. By insisting on opposition and employing an expressionistic writing style, Adorno invited readers to question his authority and formulate their own views. In this work, author B.R. Sharma uses similar tactics to isolate, revisit, and criticize some of Adorno's key philosophies. The result is a comprehensive and clear overview of Adorno's cultural theories that unearths trends pointing to the eventual death of art.

In this lucid, witty, and forceful book, Shelly Errington argues that Primitive Art was invented as a new type of art object at the beginning of the twentieth century but that now, at the century's end, it has died a double but contradictory death. Authenticity and primitivism, both attacked by cultural critics, have died as concepts. At the same time, the penetration of nation-states, the tourist industry, and transnational corporations into regions that formerly produced these artifacts has severely reduced supplies of "primitive art," bringing about a second "death." Errington argues that the construction of the primitive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and the kinds of objects chosen to exemplify it) must be understood as a product of discourses of progress—from the nineteenth-century European narrative of technological progress, to the twentieth-century narrative of modernism, to the late- twentieth-century narrative of the triumph of the free market. In Part One she charts a provocative argument ranging through the worlds of museums, art theorists, mail-order catalogs, boutiques, tourism, and world events, tracing a loosely historical account of the transformations of meanings of primitive art in this century. In Part Two she explores an eclectic collection of public sites in Mexico and Indonesia—a national museum of anthropology, a cultural theme park, an airport, and a ninth-century Buddhist monument (newly refurbished)—to show how the idea of the primitive can be used in the interests of promoting nationalism and economic development. Errington's dissection of discourses about progress and primitivism in the contemporary world is both a lively introduction to anthropological studies of art institutions and a dramatic new contribution to the growing field of cultural studies.

This highly sensitive and beautifully written book looks closely at the way contemporary Western artists negotiate death, both as personal experience and in the wider community. Townsend discusses but moves beyond the 'spectacle of death' in work by artists such as Damien Hirst to see how mortality - in particular the experience of other people's death - brings us face to face with profound ethical and even political issues. He looks at personal responses to death in the work of artists as varied as Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin and Derek Jarman, whose film 'Blue' is discussed here in depth. Exploring the last body of work by the the Kentucky-based photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Jewish American installation artist Shimon Attie's powerful memorial work for the community of Aberfan, Townsend considers death in light of the injunction to 'love they neighbour'.

This is one of the best resources for understanding the Tarot's mystical symbolism. It includes an updated history based on Place's The Tarot: History Symbolism and Divination, which "Booklist" said " may be the best book ever written on ...the tarot." This edition adds color illustrations of key works and comparative illustrations from the Renaissance, from alchemical texts, from ancient Egypt, and from occult sources. It views the Tarot as a 500-year visual conversation between artists, mystics, and occultists. The work is based on the 2010 Tarot exhibition at the LA Craft and Folk Art Museum, curated by Place, and includes the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, the 1st Italian printed deck, the oldest Tarot of Marseille, The 1st occult reference, the 1st occult Tarot, the 1st modern Tarot, the 1st New Age Tarot, and examples from popular modern decks including the Twilight Tarot, the Legacy Tarot, the Deviant Moon Tarot, the Annotated Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery, and Place's Alchemical Tarot.

Nineteenth-century Victorian-era mourning rituals--long and elaborate public funerals, the wearing of lavishly somber mourning clothes, and families posing for portraits with deceased loved ones--are often depicted as bizarre or scary. But behind many such customs were rational or spiritual meanings. This book offers an in-depth explanation at how death affected American society and the creative ways in which people responded to it. The author discusses such topics as mediums as performance artists and postmortem painters and photographers, and draws a connection between death and the emergence of three-dimensional media.

"Meeting the Needs of Our Clients Creatively: The Impact of Art and Culture on Caregiving" is an important new work which integrates traditional understandings of care of the dying and bereaved with the use of arts and other forms of cultural creativity in therapy and funeralization. Twenty-one authors give us cutting-edge insights into the practical aspects of caring for the dying and bereaved as well as new understandings of creativity.

The ancient Greeks devoted a significant portion of their poetic and artistic energy to exploring themes of death. Vermeule examines the facts and fictions of Greek death, including burial and mourning, visions of the underworld, souls and ghosts, the value of heroic death in battle, the quest for immortality, the linked powers of death, sleep, and love, and more. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.