https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sE-UgI43sB4
So in the 19th century Wagner came up with this term, the Gesamtkunstwerk, this notion of the total work of art, right, the perfect work of art. And it’s in that notion, in that idea of a total work of art that he developed his Ring Cycle of operas. And his idea was to create a work of art which would join together all the different arts into one thing. And so he thought that the opera was the perfect place to do that, to take narrative, to take music, have dance, have also visual representation in terms of composition, all of that pulled together into one massive total artwork. We have, a lot of people have said that in fact, the real, let’s say, Gesamtkunstwerk is the movie. The movie does exactly that. It pulls together these narratives and it has, like an expensive good movie, has this amazing soundtrack which actually follows the narrative structure. They have a science, like a musical science of following narrative structure using music. And there’s also the composition of the screen, there’s color, all of that comes together into this example of the perfect, let’s say, so I chose two images, one of a high end, more artsy movie and one which is the recent popular end game movie which was, I saw it, which was absolutely visually astounding. It’s astounding what they can do. And in terms of narrative, also pulling in all these stories, dealing with myth, using mythological structures, it’s pretty amazing what they’re able to come together. And as we look forward, obviously, we are looking towards a possibility of having absolute total immersive narrative with all of that story, everything, we could have this immersive complete experience of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, this total artwork coming into our field of vision. And so you would think, right, and then just for Father Stephen, I added that this this morning, the holodeck from Star Trek, which is the ultimate imaginable possible, perfect cultural experience would be in the holodeck. But you would think, right, so you would think that, imagine a culture that has come to create such perfection, that has come to create these works of narrative structure that cost millions and hundreds of millions of dollars to make and bring about hundreds of millions of people to come see them, you would think that, you would think, wow, if we’ve reached that level of cultural manifestation, we definitely should have a pretty beautiful, cohesive society, right? Turns out that is not the case. Turns out, in fact, that it is not, and as most of us have seen in the past few years, we have noticed, in fact, the very contrary. As we watch the social fabric in Western Europe, in North America, as we watch it start to fray and start to dissolve, and we’re seeing things we haven’t seen since the 1930s, people fighting in the streets. The signs are not good in terms of where our culture is leading us. So what’s the problem? What’s the problem? Why is our culture, which is so refined, and you don’t have to go watch the Marvel movie, you can go see an extremely elitist opera, an extremely elitist concert, all of these things you can go to. We have more culture available to us than any time in all the history of the entire world. You could see any show you want, anything you want, you could probably find a place and you could go see it. You could go to Broadway, and there are tons of shows, there are tons of museums, tons of everything. So why is it that we are there, right? One of the problems, there is many. One of the problems is the problem of entertainment. We have come to a point where we have confused culture and entertainment. We think that culture is to go somewhere and sit and have an aesthetic experience. And there’s a book, a wonderful book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Some of you maybe have read it by Neil Postman. And he says, when a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business evolves, and they become a part of the world. And if you do this, a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a clear possibility. Yeah. And social media is the ultimate version of this. Because, and I say that I am on social media, right, Father Stephen, we’re all on social media, we’re all using social media. But social media has tricked us in believing that we are not relationships, which are performance and consumption. That’s what we’re doing on social media. We are posting things and people are voyeuristically watching them, and I don’t even know who’s watching my, who’s interacting with my stories on social media. We have turned our relationships into performances and into audiences. That is how our relationships have been, have been transformed into by this problem of culture. Traditional culture, traditional art, in every single traditional culture in the world, including, you know, Western medieval culture, including Eastern Orthodox culture, culture is participative. Culture is not culture, the ultimate act of culture, or the arts are not spectacles, are not only spectacles. But we, that’s all we have left of culture, right? Museums are places where things go to die. That’s what museums are. They are giant cemeteries for objects, where we have removed objects from their actual use and we have put them up to gaze at. And I’m not saying that there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing essentially wrong with looking at the past in order to learn from the past, but when that’s all that’s left of your culture, you know, when it’s all that’s left of your culture is this, you know, these spaces of performance and these spaces of showing objects that are ripped from their context. And we think that that’s lively, we think that that’s culture, then we have a serious problem.