ART AND ARTISTS

Much of Ernest Becker’s synthesis has made its way to the scientific community, but his insights are equally important in the arts and humanities. Becker, drawing heavily on the work of Otto Rank, talks about how art is one of the major ways we cope with mortality. Feeling that we can create something of value and meaning can help us accept our own mortality, and one of the ways we do that is through artistic expression.

As we saw this past year with the COVID pandemic, not only did people use art and entertainment as an escape, but we used it as a device to cope. COVID memorials made their way into the world of music, art, stories, movies, and tv shows. At EBF, we encounter artists of all kinds who use Becker, the ideas of Terror Management Theory, or related concepts in their work.

For this feature, we spoke with Rodney Herring (aka Buck), a visual artist in D.C.; Greg Bennick, a Seattle-based speaker/performer and punk rock singer; Rich Aucoin, a Canadian indie-eclectic musician; and Erica Buist, a U.K. writer and journalist who traveled the world to seven death festivals. They have all been influenced by the work of Ernest Becker and related thinkers. We hope you enjoy it!

Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural worldview that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art…

Ernest Becker discussing Otto Rank in The Denial of Death