In the art market, almost everything sold is an object such as a drawing, a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or a photograph, but there are some exceptions. These deviations may include a contract, a set of instructions, a digital video file, or a software file.

As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

I lived in Atlanta for six years after college. I only went back to St. Pete twice in that time, and both times I stayed with my aunt Linda. Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house, not having done laundry, and therefore not having clean sheets on my bed.

The job of clearing out her father’s house after his death led Jo Cooke to discover more about his childhood in Poland and strange behaviour – a process that helped her change career My father’s death from pneumonia on 1 January 2012, aged 81, was almost a relief.

Human-engineered structures and gadgets from cities to cellphones now represent an enormous mass weight of nearly 30 trillion tonnes on the planet, or vastly more than the world’s forests or life in the oceans.

CHICAGO—It was Nordstrom’s anniversary sale, and Marnie couldn’t help herself. She ran to the shoe display, and, with a swooping bear hug, grabbed up an entire row of gemstone-hued Nikes. Marnie is a self-identified hoarder, and she was here as part of an intervention of sorts.

On the second floor of a nondescript warehouse owned by New York City's Sanitation Department in East Harlem is a treasure trove—filled with other people's trash. Most of the building is used as a depot for garbage trucks, but there's a secret museum that takes over an entire floor.

TIDYING up is serious business. “Life truly begins only after you have put your house in order,” says Marie Kondo, whose bestseller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying” has elevated a household chore into a process of emancipation and self-discovery.

Would you want to inherit your friends' stuff? Your valuables might mean just as little Look around the homes of loved ones whose objects you might at some future date have the opportunity to inherit or be saddled with sorting through, and lament how few of them have a meaning for you that is anywhe

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They found him in the living room, crumpled up on the mottled carpet. The police did. Sniffing a fetid odor, a neighbor had called 911. The apartment was in north-central Queens, in an unassertive building on 79th Street in Jackson Heights. The apartment belonged to a George Bell. He lived alone.

One person, a self-described “lone wolf,” admitted that dying alone was his greatest fear. Another urged readers to consider the things that give life heft and depth, the things that keep a person from disappearing unremarked. Not work, she said, but love.

As long as she can remember, Annabelle Charbit has loathed “stuff.” She hated birthdays because birthdays meant gifts. And gifts meant finding a way to toss them. At 5 years old, Charbit would sneak toys into her younger brother’s room.

Though Documenta, the world-famous German quintennial, doesn't launch until 2017, the director of its 14th edition, Adam Szymczyk, has already decided to lift the exhibition to Athens and assembled a curatorial team there.

Hosted by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics http://www.newschool.edu/vlc http://www.veralistcenter.org

Jane Bennett - Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter

How can objects sometimes be vibrant things with an effective presence independent of the words, images, and feelings they may provoke in humans? This question is posed by Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of "Thingness," the nature of matter. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center's programs will focus on the material conditions of our lives.

Jane Bennet is a professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. In her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010), she asks how our politics might approach public concerns were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things but the things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects and manifest traces of independence and vitality? Following the tangled threads that link vibrant materialities, human selves, and the "agentic assemblages" they form, Bennett examines what hoarders, people who are preternaturally attuned to "things," can teach us about the agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff. Professor Bennet is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman's materialism.

*Location:Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor Tuesday, September 13, 2011 6:30 p.m.

Corinna Kern documented the life of George Fowler, a compulsive hoarder. In her photographs is "a closeness between the young woman behind the camera and the old man in front of it." [Itsnicethat via Digg]

Corinna Kern: George’s World

City officials in Dallas, Texas were forced to hire a contractor to help remove piles of debris from the home and locate the 67-year-old man, who had been missing for two weeks.

Animals like to hoard. Christopher E. Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a specialist in treating hoarding, says that “the mechanisms triggering this kind of biological reflex are present in all of us.

There's nothing remarkable about Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt's flat, a fifth-floor apartment on the shady side of a modernist apartment block in Munich's Schwabing district: walking distance to the lush English Gardens nearby; a balcony with black stains from years of inefficiently drained rain