An Introduction to the Total Work of Art
Ubiquitous Gesamtkunstwerk—Reverent Misunderstandings—Nationalism
and Internationalism—Medium Specificity and Interdisciplinarity
1. The Utopian Gesamtkunstwerk
Revolutionary Dresden—Origins and Sources—The Gesamtkunstwerk of
the Future—The Audience of the Future
2. Building Bayreuth
Theoretical Architecture—Gottfried Semper and Munich—The Bayreuth
Festspielhaus—Efficient Auditorium—The Mystical Abyss
3. Empathy Abstracted
Aesthetic Empathy—Empathy and Relief—Psychological Empathy—Empathy
and Abstraction—Self-Estrangement and the Fear of Space
4. The Nietzschean Festival
Georg Fuchs and the Cult of Nietzsche—The Darmstadt Artists'
Colony—Peter Behrens, Theater Reformer—The Stage of the Future—The
Prinzregententheater
5. Retheatricalizing the Theater
Ausstellung München 1908—The Munich Artists' Theater—Abstraction on
a Shallow Stage—Adolf Hildebrand and Relief Sculpture—Critical
Responses
6. The Specter of Cinema
Projections in Munich—Advertising and Consumption—Hugo Münsterberg
and the Photoplay—Reproducing Sound—Absorption and Distraction
7. Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls
Theater at the Bauhaus—Automata, Marionettes, and Dolls-Spectators
and Estrangement—The Triadic Ballet—Costume Parties and the
Gesamtkunstwerk
8. Invisible Wagner
Intoxication and Addiction—Sorcery, Conducting, and
Hypnosis—Theodor Adorno, Phantasmagorical History, and
Failure—Dilettantism—Haunting Modernism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Juliet Koss is associate professor and chair of art history at Scripps College and coordinator of the Joint Art History Program of the Claremont Colleges.
“This is an extraordinary book: thoughtful, deft, and learned, it
offers a compelling revisionist account of the history and destiny
of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The implications for our understanding of
the Gesamtkunstwerk are transformative: this book challenges us to
rethink not only a conventional history, but our propensity to
parrot a conventional party line of that history.” —David J. Levin,
University of Chicago; Executive Editor, The Opera Quarterly
“A radically revisionist, and convincing, case that the
nineteenth-century ideal of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk)
and the modernist concept of estrangement are locked in dialogue
rather than opposition, Juliet Koss’s book is necessary reading for
historians of modern spectatorship across the spectrum of art and
architectural history, media and cultural studies, politics, and
critical theory.” —Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator
of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art
“This book constitutes a major intervention in the study of
modernism both within, and well beyond, the fields of architecture
and art history. Modernism after Wagner traverses astonishingly
diverse terrain. Avoiding the elegiac register of recent studies,
Juliet Koss brings to an impossibly expansive subject a welcome
historical precision, laced with mordant wit.” —Tim Barringer, Yale
University
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