Justin Not Bieber: You might as well live

William Turner, Death on a White Horse, 1830

Théodore Géricault, Head of a Guillotined Man, 1818

Alexandre Correard, Théodore Géricault Dying, c. 1825

Hippolyte Delaroche (1797-1856), Louise Vernet, wife of the artist, on her deathbed

Maxim Vorobiev, Oak Fractured by a Lightning Bolt. Allegory on Wife's Death, 1842

Funerary Portrait of Don Mariano Francisco de Cardona, Mexico, 1768

Juan Soriano, The Dead Girl, 1938

Maria Cosway, Nightscene: A Woman and Two Children, One Apparently Dead, at Seashore, 1800

Antonio Muñoz Degrain, Motherly Love, 1912

John La Farge, The Strange Thing Little Kiosai Saw in the River, 1897

From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has no power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; -- nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

Herman Melville : Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities

Wassilij Grigorjewitsch Perov, The Drowned, 1867

Jakub Schikaneder, Utonulá, 1890

Marcel Roux, L'enfant et la Mort

Jakub Schikaneder, Dead Girl, 1909

Jaroslav Panuška, Death Looking into the Window of One Dying, 1900

Anne-François-Louis Janmot, The Poem of the Soul - Nightmare, c. 1860

Oskar Zwintscher, Grief, 1898

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lemminkainens Mother, 1897

Hans Baluschek, The Death, 1895

Goya, Out hunting for teeth, plate 12 of 'Los caprichos', late 18th century

L'homme naît sans dent,
sans cheveux et sans illusions.
et il meurt de même,
sans cheveux, sans dents
et sans illusions.

Pierre Corneille, "Pompée"

Felix Jenewein, Death, from the series "Judas Iscariot," 1897

Emil Holárek, And Forgive Us Our Sins, c. 1900

Oskar Nerlinger, The Last Exit, 1930

Asger Jorn, Ainsi on s'Ensor, 1962

Gerhard Richter, Hanged, 1988

Norbert Bisky, Freudenstadt-Aschersleben, 2006

Resume by Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl, 1836

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Procession in the Fog, 1828

Antoine Wiertz, L'Inhumation précipitée (The Hasty Burial), 1854

When Zeno was told that one of his enemies was no more he was observed to be deeply moved. "What!" said one of his disciples, "you weep at the death of an enemy?" "Ah, 'tis true," replied the great Stoic; "but you should see me smile at the death of a friend."

Wojciech Weiss, Pogrzeb w mieście, 1904

Felix Jenewein, The Suicide's Funeral, 1901

Carlo Farneti, Illustration for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, published 1935

Walter Schnackenberg, Death on the stage, 1957

Antoine Wiertz, The Suicide, 1854

Edouard Manet, Le suicide, 1877

Henry Wallis, Death of Chatterton, 1856

Herbert Boeckl, Cadaver of a Young Man, c. 1930

Albin Egger-Lienz, Finale, 1918

José Chávez Morado, Dance of Death (Carnival Figures), 1940

Diego Rivera. The Day of the Dead. 1924. Fresco. Ministry of Education, Mexico City

Remedios Varo, El hombre de la guadaña, 1947

Álmos Jaschik, The Marrow-Plantation, 1927

Alfred Kubin, The Hour of Death, 1900
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus)

A. Paul Weber, Der Schlag ins Leere, 1933

Joel Peter Witkin

William Mortensen, Death of Hypatia, 1930s

Margaret Bourke-White, Suicides of Germans in Leipzig City Hall, April 1945

Adrian Ghenie, Jumping off the Reichstag, 2008

George Tooker, Cornice, 1949

Leap Before You Look
by W.H. Auden (First Stanza)

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.