The Synthesis of the Arts: From Ceremonial Ritual to “Total Work of Art”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 19th century notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art” referred to a performance spectacle that synthesized multiple forms of the arts into a unified work, often times taking place in a grand setting that befit the spectacle. Such a performance would be a quasi-religious ceremony occurring in a location akin to a temple. We argue here that, long before aesthetic theorists devised the notion of a total work of art, religious ceremonies themselves showed all of the key features of a Gesamtkunstwerk. In fact, we propose that ceremonial rituals are essentially assemblages of arts-related behaviors and objects, and that this observation provides the historical and cognitive underpinnings for what would later become the total work of art in aesthetic practice. An important implication of this argument is that religion and the arts co-evolved during the course of human history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".