system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What are the most reputable books about art's role in society, especially in affecting social change, promoting humanist ethics, and help people cope with existence?
gpt
John Berger's *Ways of Seeing* explores how paintings reflect their age of origin, and how the way we see them is dependent on our own age.

Walter Benjamin's *The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction* suggests that the modern industrial age has transformed the role of the arts; Benjamin gave several arguments throughout his career regarding how art should be re-transformed to cope with the modern age.

Susan Sontag's *Regarding the Pain of Others* is an essay on photography that aims to answer a question posed by Virginia Woolf in *Three Guineas*: "How are we to prevent war?"

Friedrich Nietzsche's *The Birth of Tragedy* is an analysis of the arts in Ancient Greece, with the aim of showing that Greek tragedy was a balance of the 'Appolinian' and 'Dionysian' ways of life, allowing the Greeks to experience existential fulfilment.

Theodor Adorno's *Minima Moralia* is a book of aphorisms, many of which are about various artworks, which explores existential themes and the notion of 'the good life' in a post-holocaust world.