Art In The Age Of Anxiety

Artists and writers examine the bombardment of information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in online and offline life in the post-digital age. Every day we are bombarded by information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in our online and offline lives. How does the never-ending flow of data affect our powers of perception and decision making? This richly illustrated and boldly designed collection of essays and artworks investigates visual culture in the post-digital age. The essays, by such leading cultural thinkers as Douglas Coupland and W. J. T. Mitchell, consider topics that range from the future of money to the role of art in a post-COVID-19 world; from mental health in the digital age to online grieving; and from the mediation of visual culture to the thickening of the digital sphere. Accompanying an ambitious exhibition conceived by the Sharjah Art Foundation and volume editor and curator Omar Kholeif, the book is a work of art and a labor of love, emulating the labyrinthine corridors of the exhibition itself. Created by a group of writers, artists, designers, photographers, and publishers, Art in the Age of Anxiety calls upon us to consider what our collective future will be and how humanity will adapt to it.

In his debut novel, rock legend Pete Townshend explores the anxiety of modern life and madness in a story that stretches across two generations of a London family, their lovers, collaborators, and friends. A former rock star disappears on the Cumberland moors. When his wife finds him, she discovers he has become a hermit and a painter of apocalyptic visions. An art dealer has drug-induced visions of demonic faces swirling in a bedstead and soon his wife disappears, nowhere to be found. A beautiful Irish girl who has stabbed her father to death is determined to seduce her best friend's husband. A young composer begins to experience aural hallucinations, expressions of the fear and anxiety of the people of London. He constructs a maze in his back garden. Driven by passion and musical ambition, events spiral out of control -- good drugs and bad drugs, loves lost and found, families broken apart and reunited. Conceived jointly as an opera, The Age of Anxiety deals with mythic and operatic themes. Hallucinations and soundscapes haunt this novel in an extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity.

A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

Discusses the art of the 1930s and the social and political movements which influenced it.

An acclaimed philosopher shows us how—in an age of unprecedented anxiety—we can find fulfillment by embracing the present and living more fully in the now. He is "the perfect guide for a course correction in life" (from the Introduction by Deepak Chopra). The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it. Alan Watts draws on the wisdom of Eastern philosophy and religion in this timeless and classic guide to living a more fulfilling life. His central insight is more relevant now than ever: when we spend all of our time worrying about the future and lamenting the past, we are unable to enjoy the present moment—the only one we are actually able to inhabit. Watts offers the liberating message that true certitude and security come only from understanding that impermanence and insecurity are the essence of our existence. He highlights the futility of endlessly chasing moving goalposts, whether they consist of financial success, stability, or escape from pain, and shows that it is only by acknowledging what we do not know that we can learn anything truly worth knowing. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts explains complex concepts in beautifully simple terms, making this the kind of book you can return to again and again for comfort and insight in challenging times. “Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’” —Los Angeles Times

A study of Hans Bellmer's eroticized images and the psychological origins of his disturbing art.

Best Spiritual Books of 2018 - Spirituality & Practice Zen wisdom for identifying the causes of mental and emotional anxiety epidemic in today's world and for finding the path to a peaceful heart in the midst of them--a path that leads directly though the center of the anxiety we're trying to escape. Wrestling with fear doesn’t have to be a negative experience. This book offers an approach to life that unlocks a new way of thinking and being in the world, one that leads directly through the center of the anxieties we seek to avoid. Written in the style of an owner’s manual, a guide to being human, Burkett focuses on areas of pain and anxiety as they tend to manifest for modern people: feelings of unworthiness, and issues surrounding sex, money, failure, and even death. Providing wisdom from Zen (channeled through his many experiences as a psychotherapist) and using language and metaphors from popular culture, he takes anxiety and teaches us to turn those fears into the building blocks of a fulfilling life.

The book proposes a radically revised understanding of the epoch of the Danish Golden Age by investigating the historical and literary contexts of Søren Kierkegaard’s pioneering thoughts on anxiety.