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 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wooden_spiral_stairs_(Nebotičnik,_Ljubljana).jpg)REFERENCESJF's upcoming course on the nature and power of art (https://www.nuralearning.com/art-and-contemplation.html), starting May 10th, 2021JF Martel, [Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice](https://www.amazon.ca/Reclaiming-Art-Age-Artifice-Treatise/dp/1583945784/ref=sr11?dchild=1&keywords=reclaiming+art&qid=1619535152&sr=8-1)Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress card (https://www.weirdstudies.com/84) Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (https://bookshop.org/books/the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/9781453722480) Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1664894/) Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/) Adam Savage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Savage), Special effects designer Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780816614028) Kabbalistic emanationist cosmology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Kabbalah)) Henry Corbin’s concept of the “imaginal” (https://www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-and-the-imaginal/) William Shakespeare, The Tempest (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780743482837) [Tibetan book of the Dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BardoThodol)_ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781853260063) James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780882143538) Phil Ford, “Battlefield medicine” (https://dialmformusicology.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/battlefield-medicine/) Jaques Ellul, idea of “technique” (https://ellul.org/themes/ellul-and-technique/) Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780307476821) Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (https://bookshop.org/books/dynamics-of-faith/9780060937133)