The Total Work of Art or the Total Way of Life
Gesamtkunstwerk is a term that literally means the total work of art. However, it contains too many conceptions in itself. First appearance of this term is in Richard Wagner’s Die Kunst und die Revolution [“The Art and Revolution”], dated 1849. Roughly, Gesamtkunstwerk is a notion that “heaping together the various arts – architecture, landscape painting, dance, drama and music” (Daverio, 1986). However, this Wagnerian concept brought a discussion around the totality of an art work. In other words, the definition of this concept has been extended to a wider aspect, even a wider geography or contrarily constricted to so much narrower scope, which Wagner, maybe, could not imagine. To understand the Gesamtkunstwerk, one must refer to these various definitions and conceptions. Roberts (2005) argues in his essay that, “the term may be German, but the concept refers to a recurrent dream of European modernism, aesthetic nature but religious and/or political in intent”. At this point, partly wider than John J. Daverio’s definition, Roger Formoff, gives 4 different definitions to the Gesamtkunstwerk in his book The Total Work of Art:
“1. an inter- or multi-medial union of different arts in relation to a comprehensive vision of the world and society;
2. an implicit or explicit theory of the ideal union of the arts;
3. a closed worldview, combining a social-utopian or historical, philosophical or metaphysical-religious image of the whole with a radical critique of existing society and culture;
4. a projection of an aesthetic-social or aesthetic-religious utopia, which looks to the power of art for its expression and as the aesthetic means to a transformation of society. However important t...
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...rk has become a social model or tool apart from being a music-based dream. On the other hand, one must note that, the musical aspects of this concept still lives in Opera houses, concert halls, however, with modern colleagues, cinemas. In this sense, Wagner made an invaluable contribution to a deeper understanding of the total work of art with building the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk on top of the prior conceptualizations of the total work of art.
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What struck me as odd throughout my research, aside from many eerie coincidences in the progression of their lives, was how many times the subject of Ludwig van Beethoven appeared in my research, as he was Wagner's first real musical inspiration and various references are made to him. I was able to make many parallels between the life of Nietzsche and Beethoven, and it is in my opinion that the similarities between these two men are even more profound than the parallels between Wagner and Neitzsche. As academic interest in the comparison between these two men is buried beneath an overwhelming amount of material relating Nietzsche and more directly related historical characte...
Willoughby, David. "Chapter 11." The World of Music. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. 249-53. Print.
Art can mean many different things to many different people and was one of the earliest ways in which man has expressed him or herself to others, whether it was through cave drawings or hieroglyphics. It does not begin or end with just drawing or painting, items typically considered art, or the many other recognized facets of art including architecture, drama, literature, sculpting, and music. My research is based on Vincent van Gogh art, and two art paintings that I choose to study is The Starry Night, 1889, and the second art is The Sower 1888. Vincent van Gogh’s is known for Impressionism, that occurs to us in these times, much more to affirm close links with tradition, and to represent
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This paper deals, in broadest terms, with the questions of how artwork is connected to the changes and dynamics that prevail in a society. To describe these changes, I will investigate how a specific type of art reflects its social content in contemporary societies. My analysis is carried out by closely looking at the Pop Art movement, especially with Andy Warhol, who has come to be known as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. It will be argued that Pop Art managed to successfully articulate its time, and in so doing, it became a widely influential art movement whose effect is still very much existent in today’s world of art. In order to prove its claim, this paper relies on the theory of “the field of cultural production” by Pierre
Thesis: The French Revolution transformed not only the French society, but also had a huge influence and marked impact on what the purposes of the arts and their expression were now, making profound changes in what they would supposed to be used for, in the form of the Neoclassic works of art that made their appearance prior to the French Revolution, in which very special emphasis is given to the patriotic, the nationalist feeling, together with a strong sense of self-sacrifice that should be present in every person’s heart.
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