ABSTRACT
This chapter is result of collaboration between an anthropologist, a team of psychotherapists, and a community of artists. The impetus for this collaboration was a wish to design a counseling service for arts conservatory that could best respond to the psychological challenges facing the aspiring performing artist in the twenty-first century. In 2005, Joseph Polisi published The Artist as Citizen, a book composed of speeches he had delivered over the previous 20 years of his tenure as president at Juilliard. Especially important in the present context, Polisi invoked "the idea of the artist as hero". Bataille's inversion of economic life has radical implications for understanding artistic expression, the goal of an arts conservatory, and the counseling role within it. The Juilliard spectacle is measured by more than artistic excellence; it’s measured in willingness of the school to spend its dearest resource by committing its students to goal “that reaches beyond what has been expected of them in an earlier time”.
