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But it was in the staging of his own plays that he approached the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk or integrated artwork.

An interdisciplinary artist who doesn’t dabble in composition, performance, filmmaking and choreography so much as create from a Gesamtkunstwerk state of mind, in which each medium is dependent on the other, Monk is both a holdout of New York’s “downtown” past and a sui generis American master.

But perhaps we do not need “Oliver!” to be a Gesamtkunstwerk.

“They found this way to kind of industrialize the Gesamtkunstwerk,” or total work of art, Fineberg said.

He appeared periodically, Oz-like, as a video projection on a floating egg, making oracular pronouncements, from claiming, “The weapon is good; the penis is bad,” to predicting that 2023 will be the year when Germany becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.