ABSTRACT
On one hand: the Gesamtkunstwerk is impossible. It is a lantern image, a ghost in glass. Utopia, thus nowhere.
On the other: the Gesamtkunstwerk is sensuous and concrete. It takes form in literature, in music, in opera, in painting, in dance, in theatre, in drama, in film, in politics. Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Marinetti, Mann; Wagner, Strauss, Schönberg; Böcklin, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy; Diaghilev, Schlemmer, Duncan; Maeterlinck, Meyerhold, Appia, Craig; Gropius, Corbusier, van der Rohe; Eisenstein, Riefenstahl, Disney. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin.
