In the late 19th century, talking about attention was all the rage. And of all that century’s artists and thinkers, Richard Wagner had perhaps the most wildly oscillating views on the fraught relationship between the production and consumption of works of art. At times, these views were a holdover from his revolutionary days: He held an extreme disdain for the very notion of selling the rights to one’s work, which he believed should belong to the general public or, more problematically, “the nation.” At others, they were authoritarian and bizarre. Closer to the end of his artistic output, Wagner longed for a kind of indolent, benevolent aristocracy whose members, unsullied by vulgar bourgeois productive forces, could become true, steadfast, and unusually receptive patrons of the arts.
Unlimited access to our
