This is an unedited list (meaning I added every suggestion I received) a friend compiled a couple of years ago. She asked all of her artist friends to tell her what the best, most influential, inspirational, essential reading material was for artists. This list is the result of responses from many different people.
Please let me know if there is something missing and I will add it. Also, if there is a mistake (example: a book listed as an essay), please let me know. Thank you!
Happy Reading!

MISC:
Ad Reinhardt, Dogmatist Manifesto
12 Rules

FILMS/VIDEOS:
Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970 is a 1972 documentary directed by Emile de Antonio

WEBSITES:
Postmodern Generator http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

http://www.techgnosis.com/

ESSAYS:
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Henri Bergson, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

Focault, “this is not a pipe” and “Discipline and Punish.”

Freud, The Uncanny
Fetishism

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood

Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes
(http://www.mrbauld.com/frostfig.html)

Clement Greenburg, Avant-garde and Kitsch
The Plight of Culture

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

SHORT STORIES:
J.D. Salinger De Daumier Smith’s Blue Period

BOOKS:

Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Eric Auerbach, Mimesis

Geschichten des Augenblicks, Moments in Time: On Narration and Slowness

Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Jaques Barzun, Use and Abuse of Art

Gregory Battcock, Minimalism

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
Simulacra

David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

Sister Wendy Beckett, The Story of Painting

Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings (Vols. 1,2 &3)
The Arcades Project
Illumniations

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner Postmodern Theory

Yves-Alain Bois, Formless

Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus, A Biography

Louise Bourgeios, Drawings and Observations

André Breton, Nadja
Mad Love

Bill Brewster, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

Bill Brown, Things

Normon Bryson, Vision and Painting

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
The Origin of Negative Dialectics
Dreamworld and Catastrophe

Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Jonathon Crary, Techniques of the Observer

Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art
The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art

Jean-François De Bastide, The Little House

Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle
Art and Otherness

Deleuze, The Fold

John Dewey, Art as Experience

Marcel Duchamp. The catalog published by MOMA and The Philadelphia Museum in 1973

David Edmonds & John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Anton Ehrenzweig, The hidden Order of Art

James Elkins, Pictures and Tears and What Painting Is

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

Eric Fischl with Jerry Saltz, Sketchbook With Voices

Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real

Michel Foucault, The History Sexuatlity

Fredrich Franck, The Awakened Eye
Art as a Way
The Zen of Seeing

Suzi Gablic, The Re Enchantment of Art
Conversations Before the End of Time

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture

Doug Hall/Sally Jo Fifer, Illuminating Video

Keith Haring and Robert Ferris Thompson, Keith Haring Journals

Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual
(http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/aar/index.htm)

Mrs. Charles W. Hawthorne, Hawthorne on Painting

Hayek, The Road to Surfdom

Eric Hebborn, Drawn to Trouble:Confessions of a Master Forger

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty

Robert Hughes, Nothing if not Critical
Culture of Complaint

Huysman, Against Nature

Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: The Idea that Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle

Thurston James, The Prop Builder’s Molding & Casting Handbook

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual In Art

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy and After

Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture
The Optical Unconscious

Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History

Donald Kuspit, The End of Art

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Lao Tze, Tao te Cheng (http://www.chinapage.com/gnl.html)

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Nita Leland, Exploring Color

Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse and Mixed Blessings

Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art

Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces

Agnes Martin, Writings

David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin Reference Books)

Kevin Macpherson, Fill your Oil Paintings with Light and Color

Rollo May, The Courage to Create

Thomas McEvilley, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt

Ian McKewen, Atonement

McLuhan, Understanding Media

John McPhee, The Control of Nature

Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

Yositomo Nara, Lullaby Supermarket

Interviews With Bruce Nauman

Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study

Nietzche, The Birth of Tragedy

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

Plato, The Republic (philosopher/warrior/artist/king)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition

Otto Rank, Art & Artist

Man Ray, Self Portrait

Gerhardt Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn

Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory

Victor Schklovsky, Zoo or Letters Not About Love

Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Thinks You Can Think

Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content

Leonard Shlair, Art & Physics

Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University

Robert Smithson’s Collected Writings

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Peace Prize lecture:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html

Susan Sontag, On Photography
Regarding the Pain of Others

Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art

Susan Stewart, On Longing

Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings 

Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw

David Sylvester, Interviews With Francis Bacon

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Davis Thompkins, Art After 1945

Anne Truitt, Daybook

Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Vasari, Lives of the Artists

Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety

Matthew von Unwerth. Freud’s Dream: Mourning, Memory, and the History of a Summer Walk

Brian Wallis ed., Art After Modernism

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B & Back Again)

Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, The Andy Warhol Diaries

David Weisner, Three Pigs

Werne, Museum Inc. Inside the Global Art World

Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting (Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin)

Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Esctacy and Effrontery

Tom Wolf, The Painted Word

Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption

Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory