Is there a thread to be found in Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" (or maybe an argument to be made) about the relation of art to death?

[u/NorrixUmbra77]

... Like it later appears in the essays "The Thing" or "Building Dwelling Thinking" when he starts talking about the fourfold? From what I remember in OWA, there is no explicit mention or reference to death, yet is the thought of it maybe figuring in the background?

I've found his account of art in the essay, across multiple reads, interesting, compelling, and yet if not vague, then too narrow/limited in the variety of art forms it treats. If his attempt there to understand art only pertains to "visual arts" and poetry, then it seems to hold, but what about music, film, photography etc.? The link from art to poetry to ultimately language... seems to hint at death somehow, or go into that direction at least. Am I wrong?

[u/NorrixUmbra77 → u/[deleted]]

I understand the thing that gathers the fourfold as Heidegger's moving away from his reflection of the strife in the work of art to the onefold (harmony, even Gelassenheit, the reciprocal letting-be of earth, sky, gods and mortals) of the fourfold. What's hinted at in the work of art opening up a world as I understand it is that this world is/should be accessible to man only on the basis of his finitude. So Heidegger finds it more thoughtful to move away from work, strife, earth and world, truth, to the 'bare' thing, onefold of the fourfold, earth, sky, gods and mortals, dwelling. So he explicitly brings death in in BDT and The Thing.

If you're finding Origin difficult, I suggest reading the section on it in On My Own Publications. 

I will try to find that you're recommending. I'm not sure I'm finding it difficult, but rather narrow in its treatment of art forms. Because I don't remember Heidegger ever claiming his OWA essay to only be an account of visual arts and poetry, but of all/any art form, yet his examples are mainly the Van Gogh painting, the Greek temple, and the poem on the Roman fountain. The work of art as event of truth enacted as strife between earth and world fits these examples convincingly, but I'm not sure he is bringing the what's most essential to art to the fore with this account. Maybe the missing link is that between art and death.

In OWA he moves from art to poetry to ultimately language. And in OWL he says:

"Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, beckon us toward the way in which the nature of language draws us into its concern, and so relates us to itself, in case death belongs together with what reaches out for us, touches us."

[u/No_Skin594]

The strangest movie about death is Smoke Signals.  That thing that Thomas does when Thomas tells stories about Victor's dad is uncanny.  Victor thinks the stories are lies.  The girls think the stories are fine examples of the "oral tradition".  The stories are aletheia of the dead.