David Roberts's The Total Work of Art in European Modernism extends and deepens the analysis of the counter-paradigm of redemptively inspired art to modernism's own pre-occupation with secularization. It addresses the imbalance in social and critical theory whereby progressive secular rationalization has been elevated to the sole logic of modernity, and the romantic redemptive tradition has been reduced to a marginal counter-enlightenment. The total work of art paradigm allows Roberts to demonstrate how the programme of modernity has been constituted by (...) internal tensions and antinomies from the very beginning. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to revise and extend two prior conceptions: Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of Enlightenment and Murphy and Robert’s dialectic of Romanticism. It traces a developmental trajectory within German Kultur, starting around the mid-18th century, that goes through three moments or phases: the Grecophilia of Goethe and Schiller, the Grecomania of Hölderlin, Schelling and early Hegel, and the Grecogermania of Wagner, Nietzsche and Heidegger. The latter provided the ideological underpinning of Hitler’s Nazism. Thus the paper aims to (...) show that Nazism had deep roots within the soil of German Kultur, for almost from the very start Classicism and anti-Semitism were integral aspects of the one cultural movement. Furthermore, this movement was the one surrogate form of a Neo-Pagan and anti-Christian trend in German modernity. (shrink)

David Roberts has always had a keen, sharp and even mischievous eye for paradox, for pointing to what used to be termed in Hegelianese, ‘contradictions’ or ‘dialectics’ of modern society and its forms. Roberts’ keen eye has focused on the paradoxes (rather than negative dialectics) of aesthetic modernity and the forms that these paradoxes have taken within the historical time consciousness and self-understanding of modernity. This paper will suggest – although only sketchily and in outline – that Roberts’ keen eye (...) notices and reconstructs three paradoxical models or forms of aesthetic modernity: 1. The total work of art of aesthetic modernism; 2. the contemporary postmodern plurality of the present which is captured as musealization; 3. interpretation, play and humour as the open acceptance of the contingency and paradoxes of the present. (shrink)

The notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a modern political phenomenon – the merging of art and life and the artistic transformation of life in its totality – has been limited to public political spectacle and the theatrical enactments of state programs. In contrast, this article about the Soviet 1920s and 1930s looks at everyday life or, in Russian, byt, as the primary domain of modern aesthetico-political intervention. The successful ordering of everyday life according to the principles of communism would mean (...) that even the most intimate aspects of citizens’ lives become part of a total work of art, which now encompasses not only the public but also the private sphere. The author traces the evolution of byt reform from the aesthetic associations between bureaucrats and artists of the 1920s to the 1930s mobilization of ordinary citizens as artists who mould their everyday environments in accordance with Stalinist politics. (shrink)

The scope of David Roberts’ book on the Total Work of Art is daunting. It stretches from the French Revolution through to the modernist avant-garde and its dissolution in totalitarianism. If Wagner is its chief leader and artistic animator, it also echoes back to Robespierre, Napoleon and Saint-Simon, and through at least to Bolshevism and Futurism, Stalinism and Italian Fascism. The total work of art totalizes the world of the artwork, but it also adds in the politics of the sublime, (...) turns politics into art and negates both as independent spheres of existence at the same time. In this piece I offer some observations on the thinking of a key switchman in this story: Leon Trotsky. (shrink)