Madoff rethinks modernism—from Wagner to Duchamp, Dada to the Bauhaus—for our present era of network culture

For more than a century, European modernist art has been written about as a profound expression of fragmentation—of an alienated world in pieces. In this book, critic and curator Steven Henry Madoff proposes that there was always another artistic intention present among the modernists that offered visions of wholeness in the face of anomie brought on by wars and new technologies. From the mid-nineteenth century, when Richard Wagner championed his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art), to the rise of the Bauhaus out of the ruins of World War I as the most influential art school of the twentieth century, the urge to connect different art forms into single, unified works points toward our own omnipresent culture of networks and has given rise, over the last sixty years, to such artistic practices as installation and performance art that also combine many kinds of art into one—dreams of interconnectivity binding disparate elements together. Using the contemporary lens of network aesthetics to rethink the artworks of some of the towering figures of European modernism, including Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, and Walter Gropius, this book revises standard readings of this historical art, providing not only a way to more deeply understand the art of the present, but also as a way to look at and reimagine our own society in a time of increasingly divisive turmoil.