Humans spend over $147 billion a year on the dead. We turn ashes into diamonds, build coffins shaped like Coca-Cola bottles, and craft art for people who will never see it.
And we’ve been doing this for 75,000 years for the same audience …that isn’t there.
Do we actually believe the dead need any of this? Or is this ritual really for something else entirely?
In this video, I track funerary art across civilizations to uncover what we’re really trying to protect when we create art for the dead.
