Gesamtkunstwerk - Modern Art Terms and Concepts

Artworks don’t manage knowledge—they channel it. It takes time and attention to understand an artwork’s meaning. Each piece demands a process of reconciliation, and a merging of two contexts: the artwork’s own history and the viewer’s private knowledge network. When it’s placed in a new context, its meaning evolves and expands elastically. It store... See more

- At the opening of the Bauhaus institution Walter Gropius read his manifesto which declared in part: - | “there is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman”

Again, imagine the dynamism of an art object. In its enduring singularity, it retains that which we impress upon it; it suggests and offers knowledge, but it never instructs. It is a portal to knowledge, but not the knowledge in and of itself.