The Total Work of Art

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk -the ideal of the "total work of art"-has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk 's lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates.