Overview

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.

Discussion of Artistic Perspectives

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.

Artists and Personal Responses

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.

Exploration of Specific Works

Exploring the last body of work by 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 thy neighbour.