Episode 97: Art in the Age of Artifice

The question of art has been of central concern for JF and Phil since Weird Studies began in 2018. What is art? What can it do that other things can't do? How is it connected to religion, psyche, and our current historical moment? Is the endless torrent of advertisements, entertainment, memes, and porn in which seem hopelessly immersed a manifestation of art or of something else entirely? In this exploration of the main ideas in JF's book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, your hosts focus on these burning questions in hopes that the answers might shed light on our collective predicament and the paths that lead out of it.

Photo by Petar Milošević via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

JF's upcoming course on the nature and power of art, starting May 10th, 2021

JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress card
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Adam Savage, Special effects designer
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Kabbalistic emanationist cosmology
Henry Corbin’s concept of the “imaginal”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Tibetan book of the Dead
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World
Phil Ford, “Battlefield medicine”
Jaques Ellul, idea of “technique”
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith