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Introduction: The Gesamtkunstwerk Today?
If you succeed, that only means you did not want enough. Wagner’s ambitions in the book The Art-Work of the Future, written in 1849, are extreme. This is where he introduces the concept of ”Gesamtkunstwerk”, and this is the book about which I thought I would say a couple of words here. It wants nothing less than to sketch the outlines of a future form of society, and of the total work of art around which this society is to organize, as its highest determining principle. Here, aesthetics and politics are completely inseparable. I think it is fair to say that the utopia that is created in The Art-Work of the Future has never been realized. Which is not to say that that it has not had both great and disastrous effects: the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk is intimately weaved together with modern artistic and political history. Perhaps, what is essential is exactly this: that the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk is strictly unrealizable, and can, for this reason, remain a dream for art to relate to, a utopia that can direct artistic, aesthetical and philosophical practices, in widely separated historical and political contexts. Why discuss the Gesamtkunstwerk today? The answer could be very simple: because it is a concept that has never lost its topicality. It is not less relevant now than it was one and a half centuries ago.

Excerpt from Introduction: The Gesamtkunstwerk Today? by Kim West.

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