In this sense, вЂњLifesвЂќ is not unlike a party-guest list for which Moshayedi served as host. This horizontality challenges established hierarchies-between artist and critic as much as between artist and Hollywood actor-but it also makes equivalences between things that might actually be dissimilar moreover, while pointing to a collective project, it invites fascination with personalities and proper names at the expense of what used to be called the work. One of the things that first intrigued me about вЂњLifesвЂќ-in addition to the showвЂ™s advertisements, their receding gridded plane reminiscent of SuperstudioвЂ™s Endless Monument-is that its various contributors share equal footing on the lengthy artist list, which suggests an exhibition much larger than what one actually encounters in the gallery. (The old critical bogeyman spectacle feels too dated a word.) It is the curator who created this multimedia collab. Many different types of professionals pumped life into this project, including musicians (Pauline Oliveros), actors (Aubrey Plaza), artists (Rosemarie Trockel), choreographers (Andros Zins-Browne), critics (Greg Tate), dramaturges (Adam Linder), and poet-painter-pianists (Wayne Koestenbaum), but what is striking, and somewhat surprising, is that most of these figures work in rather traditional, or at least discrete, media. It has been suffused with a purplish glow and outfitted with projectors and speakers (a handout tells you of various diversions taking place minute to minute), and one imagines a massive hard drive somewhere controlling the lighting, the projection of the videos, and the playing of the soundtracks that produce the ever-changing-and seemingly very expensive-mise-en-scГЁne.

Entering the exhibition, one steps not into a white cube but a managed environment, the space is more timed than timeless. The space is cavernous and vast-there are no partitions or dividing walls-and the floor has been carpeted so as to highlight the presence of the viewerвЂ™s body in the space, alongside the artworks. The scene of вЂњLifesвЂќ feels less like a gallery than a stage, if not a fun house or a discotheque. This is the question at the heart of Aram MoshayediвЂ™s вЂњLifes,вЂќ at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and while the exhibition may be largely symptomatic, it leads us to places from which we might begin to think the present. If WagnerвЂ™s work was archaic and artificial, the composer also thought of it as a вЂњdrama of the future,вЂќ so itвЂ™s interesting to consider the Gesamtkunstwerk again today, 150 years later, when lifeвЂ™s components are ever more linked and animated by a web of ostensibly smart devices. Beginning in 1876 under the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Richard Wagner launched a festival to stage his epic operas in Bayreuth, Germany, inspiring a devoted, at times fascistic, cult as well as fierce critics (Adorno once described him as вЂњa revolutionary who conciliates the despised members of the middle class by recounting heroic deeds now pastвЂќ). Built from dance, music, theater, and poetry, it sought to stanch the crisis of modernity with a multisensory experience: If life was breaking up-split between public and private, work and leisure-the вЂњtotal work of artвЂќ promised to bind disciplines and audience together to create something like community.

THE GESAMTKUNSTWERKis one of modernismвЂ™s most telling inventions.

Wall: Morag Keil, The Vomit Vortex, 2022. Floor: Charles Gaines, Falling Rock, 2000. View of вЂњLifes,вЂќ 2022, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Alex keil