The Gesamtkunstwerk building in Miami, is a multi-disciplinary creative initiative designed to give a curated group of businesses and individuals the long-term stability needed to coninue their efforts. Miami’s Total Hive is Now Thriving...
Once upon another time, in a world far different from ours, a colossally creative type was searching for the perfect term to describe his colossally comprehens
ive creations. Unlike those who’d come before him, the searcher refused to limit himself either in name or in discipline, and instead sought to include elements of everything vital under the moon, the stars and the sun. That man was Richard Wagner, and the term he chose to define his universal aesthetic was Gesamtkunstwerk. Literally “total art work”, and meant to mean art that’s created from many other art forms, the term was employed by the German composer in his essays “Art and Revolution” and “The Artwork of the Future” (both 1849), and has since come to be equated with everything from medieval cathedrals to Andy Warhol’s persona. More recently, it’s been applied by the equally celebrated Anselm Kiefer, first in the Saatchi and Saatchi exhibition “Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany”, then to define his 35-hectare studio compound, La Ribaute. however, there’s a new application of the all-encompassing term, and this time it’ll concern not just art (or even an artist’s persona or compound), but the very edifice where a multi-genre contingent of creatives base their operations. Yes, we mean Gesamtkunstwerk, the sprawling former bike factory located on Miami’s Northwest 7th Avenue, at 30th Street, in the wilds just west of Wynwood. The very place where the very most influential of our city’s operatives ply their trade and create sensation. Put into play by Francisco De La Torre, whose Butter Gallery was one of the hotspots that helped to bring infamy to Wynwood, the Gesamtkunstwerk building houses not only the bigger and badder Butter Gallery, but also the equally renowned Spinello Gallery, as well as the racket-making Wynwood Radio, the promotion/production/DJ duo dubbed Nightdrive, the art and marketing outfit known as Product/81, and (eventually) the wholesale headquarters of the increasingly popular Panther Coffee. Like the tried and true term itself, not to mention the phenomena of its most aligned minds, Gesamtkunstwerk will be limited only to whatever imagination can envision and talent can realize. Unlike its predecessors though, the multiple genres upon which this new Gesamtkunstwerk is fused combine traditional art forms with those of broadcasting, gastronomy and commerce. That is to say whatever it takes to make magic in, of and for the 21st century, and wherever such efforts may lead. As for any unwieldiness folks might find in what for many will be a foreign term, De La Torre offers a quick mea culpa:
“Gesamtkunstwerk has an incredible lineage and history, and that’s reason enough alone to learn how to say the word. It also perfectly defines the combination of ideas and disciplines we’ve got gathered under one roof. Gesamtkunstwerk is limitless, and it’s all inclusive; kinda like Miami itself. Besides, a vocabulary is meant to be expanded.”
Considering the vast variety of fields being farmed in this urban edifice, and the polyglot lot that now calls this great place home, Gesamtkunstwerk marks a new universal, one which not only embraces the best and the brightest ideas the world can concoct, but provides a compelling space to create them, and a stage so that they may be appreciated by all the world.
