Shapeshifting + Worldbuilding: How to Be a Great Artist
How Grace Wales Bonner, Solange, Kode9 and a new generation of artists build total, livable worlds ~ frameworks for living that expand our freedom to become more fully ourselves.
Grace Wales Bonner’s world has texture. It can be worn, read, listened to, and moved through. Her 2013 dissertation on contemporary Black artistic identities set a framework — “a distinct notion of cultural luxury that infuses European heritage with an Afro-Atlantic spirit” — that has since generated fashion collections, archival research, curated music, published literature, and film.
Each new tendril is immediately recognisable as part of the same root system. To encounter Wales Bonner’s world is to be handed a vocabulary for your own becoming. To inhabit it is to borrow her philosophy, implement it through your own lens, and emerge more fully yourself than before.
This is what the total work of art is capable of at its highest degree. It is not a product to be consumed, a style to be imitated, or a brand to be worn. It is a framework for living.
Humanity can be defined by its propensity for shapeshifting and worldbuilding. As humans, we learn and adapt — we choose our friends, how we dress, how we decorate our homes, and in some cases our names — building our very own worlds. The two acts are both sides of the same coin: to shapeshift is to rebuild your world, and to rebuild your world is to shapeshift.
Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly in ‘Being and Nothingness’ and ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism,’ argues that there is no fixed human nature to appeal to; beneath our performances we have no stable self. Most famously: “existence precedes essence.”
Working through this framework, shapeshifting is not an eccentricity of the artistic temperament but a keen aspect of the human condition. “Man is condemned to be free,” Sartre wrote; “once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” To give life a meaning, here, is the option to create the world and philosophical framework you exist inside.
To act in “bad faith” (“mauvaise foi”) is, for Sartre, the refusal to acknowledge one’s radical freedom, the retreat into fixed roles and identities. Extended into this framework, bad faith is the refusal of shapeshifting and worldbuilding: tying yourself down to your role in society, letting the world be made for you. As Akala once asked Nines: “your environment doesn’t define you, but how can you transcend it?” In the terms being laid out here, “bad faith” is artistic death.
Nietzsche’s injunction to “become who you are” (derived from Pindar) is a call to self-creation, not self-discovery. It is a command to create the self that you will then become. The idea of the Übermensch is that of a human who has taken on the full weight of that self-creation: the person who gives themselves laws (a framework and philosophy for life) rather than inheriting them, in “bad faith,” from God, tradition, or the market.
Great artists do this on an incomparably larger scale, and with an incomparably greater degree of deliberation and alchemy.
Worldbuilding is not an elite practice reserved for geniuses; it is the human practice, elevated to its highest expression. The word for that elevation is Gesamtkunstwerk.
Gesamtkunstwerk is a German compound: Gesamt - total; Kunst - art; Werk - work. It is translated variously as the “total work of art,” the “universal artwork,” the “synthesis of the arts,” the “all-embracing art form.” The term was first introduced by Trahndorff in 1827, but Richard Wagner coined its modern usage in his 1849 essays ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’ (”The Artwork of the Future”) and ‘Oper und Drama,’ which synthesised his vision of opera as the fusion of music, poetry, and visual art. Here, the concept has far outgrown Wagner’s operatic ambitions.
The first great modern instance beyond the opera is the Ballets Russes, founded by Sergei Diaghilev between 1909 and 1929. Here, the total work of art comes together as the collision of its parts rather than merely the sum of them. Diaghilev brought together Stravinsky (music), Picasso and Matisse (set and costume design), and Nijinsky (choreography) to create something no single discipline could have generated alone. The works were revolutionary because of their broadness: they introduced abstraction and plotlessness to ballet, pushing against Plato’s concern that art is merely a twice-removed imitation of truth: a painter copying a chair that is itself a copy of the perfect Idea of a chair. The Ballets Russes did not imitate existing life; they created a new form of consciousness.
The most complete historical Gesamtkunstwerk remains Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, the Weimarian art school operational from 1919 to 1933. The Bauhaus brought to life an entire world: furniture, typography, textiles, theatre, architecture, and graphic design, all under a single philosophical framework. The school held that art and craft are not separate; it aimed to abolish the hierarchy between fine arts and applied arts, viewing the artist as an “exalted craftsman,” moving away from ornamentation toward a “less is more” minimalism.
Every modernist chair, sans-serif font, and open-plan interior since has taken cues from the Bauhaus. More importantly, while it was alive, the Bauhaus was a living philosophy that generated endlessly new work from a secure and consistent core. This is what I mean by timeless: not unchanged, but continuing to operate as a framework for living long after the Gesamtkunstwerk has had its moment. The Bauhaus offered a new light source through which to consider the world. The highest-degree Gesamtkunstwerk is a new framework for living.
Ye’s (fka Kanye West) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF) is the most frequently cited contemporary example of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and with good reason. During its creation, Ye was explicit about his ambition to create a massively expansive total work of art, in one concentrated gesture, at the highest possible production level. The album cost around $3 million to make, making it one of the most expensive albums ever recorded. He assembled potentially hundreds of collaborators, brought together custom paintings by George Condo, a 35-minute film accompaniment directed by Hype Williams, and elaborate packaging art directed by Virgil Abloh.
MBDTF is an exploration of human self-indulgence and toxicity taken to its most spectacular register: you enter it, and you leave it. Ye opened and closed the world in under two years, establishing its wide-ranging foundations and output before shutting it down before it could expand or shapeshift. The spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk is entirely valid. But the livable one is far rarer, and far harder to build. Guy Debord argued that modern capitalist life is reduced to a “spectacle” of images (advertisements, news, entertainment) that alienate us from lived experience. Jean Baudrillard extended this, arguing that the spectacle has itself become a simulacrum: a copy without an original. In this economy, the image of total art circulates as cultural currency, often outrunning the work itself. The livable world, when truly enacted, resists this because it is too distributed, too embedded in daily life, to collapse into a single representable image. MBDTF is spectacular enough to be immediately iconisable — the censored covers, the price tag, the guest list — in a way that Wales Bonner’s or Solange’s worlds are not.
The best entry point into Grace Wales Bonner’s world is her own description: “Wales Bonner proposes a distinct notion of cultural luxury that infuses European heritage with an Afro-Atlantic spirit.” This, alongside her rigorous academic research into archival material centred on the African diaspora, Black intellectualism, and the spiritual and the sensory, sets the framework that generates everything she makes; the protected core from which all of her world’s expansion proceeds. Her practice integrates research, literature, music, film, curation, and fashion design. The garment and the research essay are differently embodied manifestations of the same thought. This is the multimedia non-negotiability the contemporary total work of art argues for: not simply that it engage more senses simultaneously (though Wales Bonner’s does), but that different media reinforce and traverse each other until the world feels inescapable and livable.
The Wales Bonner world embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome in the truest sense — spreading in multiple directions simultaneously without becoming centreless, with an internal consistency that makes every new tendril recognisably part of the same root system. Wales Bonner’s world is total without being totalising.
Kode9 is my most intellectual case study, and perhaps my most underappreciated. The founder of Hyperdub Records, author of Sonic Warfare (a rigorous academic text on the weaponisation of sound), a philosopher (one of the founders of the CCRU), and a DJ and producer spanning grime, dubstep, ambient, and conceptual electronic music, his practice collides the club, the classroom, and the art gallery. His work evokes expanse, minimality, and a mastery of sound that coheres across every register of his practice.
His album Astro-Darien is built around Scotland’s 1690s Darien scheme (its catastrophic failed attempt to colonise Panama) reimagined as a speculative futurist world. This example proves a crucial allowance for the contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk: it need not be autobiographical. Kode9’s world is built around a philosophy, a sensory texture, and a set of recurring questions about power, space, colonialism, and sound. Astro-Darien is a new conceptual world that uses historical material as a raw ingredient, alchemised beyond recognition. You can’t see the seam between the real-world source and the transformation. That is the mark of a high-degree alchemy.
Solange’s practice is one of the clearest examples of the livable Gesamtkunstwerk. Through her Saint Heron library, she has put out glassware and literature and hosted community programming, creating an accessible invitation to inhabit her philosophy. Her musical output largely centres her experience as a Black woman in America.
Where MBDTF is a $3 million entry-and-exit world of spectacular self-indulgence, Solange’s practice invites community and leverages Saint Heron’s accessibility into a political and aesthetic statement about who art is for and how it can be inhabited.
This is where Bertolt Brecht’s objection to the Gesamtkunstwerk becomes important to address properly. Brecht formed his theatre theory largely in opposition to the Wagnerian total work of art, arguing that Wagner’s immersive synthesis created a dreamlike, druglike state in the audience — a state of hypnosis that prevented critical, rational engagement with the work and the political issues it pointed to. Brecht sought what he called an alienation effect: techniques that kept the audience awake to the fact of their spectatorship, so they could think rather than merely feel.
The worlds of Solange and Wales Bonner directly rebut this concern by making the immersive world itself a thinking space. The Saint Heron Library is most literally a community resource for exploring Black and Brown cultural histories, and so to truly inhabit the world requires engagement with critical thought. The immersive world, at its highest degree, produces critical consciousness through inclusion rather than alienation. The audience can never be fully controlled; they will always receive a world through their own lens. But the wider and deeper you make your world — the more you reinforce it across media, the more thoroughly you alchemise it — the closer the audience’s reading will inevitably converge on the artist’s intention.
This is the only way to pull audience perception toward intention: keep expanding the world, keep adding entry points, keep deepening the philosophy. Brecht’s worry is real, but it is a worry about the spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk. The livable world is its own answer to it. Living in Solange’s world does not impose a Sartrean “essence” on the liver. To live inside it is to borrow her vocabulary for your own becoming. The Gesamtkunstwerk, at its highest, is a temporary and partial home for other people’s own shapeshifting. It becomes a catalyst for the audience’s own becoming.
Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ occupies this structure in a peculiar way. The album, her writings, and the accompanying film reinforced one another in a moment of extraordinary cultural alignment. The ironic, messy, self-aware “Brat” attitude was built into the world’s texture from its inception; a smart and deliberate decision that positioned any misstep as an aesthetic move rather than a failure. The bright green cover became a cultural shorthand almost instantaneously, circulating as a sign before many people had heard the music. But this is precisely the Baudrillardian trap: ‘Brat’ risked becoming a simulacrum of itself before the underlying work had time to fully land. It was aware of this risk, and used irony partly as a hedge against it. But the awareness alone does not resolve it. The Brat world worked, in part, because the timing was right — the attitude was legible enough to travel fast and wide. However, a world that works because of cultural timing suffers from contingencies.
This is the distinction between a successful traversal and a timeless one. Timelessness is the ultimate test of how deeply the alchemising has been done. A world that shapeshifts with time — that can operate as a living philosophy decades later — is a higher form of Gesamtkunstwerk. Brat does not reach the divinity of a Bauhaus or a Wales Bonner.
It is a successful, occasionally brilliant world, but one that may not survive its own moment.
Then there’s the one that got away. Skepta, circa 2016. The world built around ‘Konnichiwa’ felt complete. The Nike trainers, the OG Mains, and the album brought together a coherent aesthetic world. It didn’t feel like a brand packaged around a musician. Skepta had crystallised a singular vision of what it meant to be a well-dressed working-class North Londoner with global ambitions and underground, political sensibilities. Everything in his world reinforced a single, coherent texture. Konnichiwa featured collaborations with A$AP Nast and Pharrell Williams, and the subsequent Praise the Lord with A$AP Rocky felt authentically an extension of the world’s logic into new territory.
What followed tore his world apart. The work with Flo Milli and Puma pulled against the world’s texture rather than extending it, feeling cheap in a way the earlier collaborations hadn’t. Skepta’s goals had become too rooted in the real world, more enamoured with going mainstream than with expanding his already-rich creative world. He had gone from a Nietzschean self-legislating creator to a shill of the mainstream; from giving himself laws to borrowing someone else’s. The world collapsed because it was compromised from within. Skepta’s later work swiftly became a simulacrum of itself: the image of Skepta the world-builder still circulating, the actual alchemising having stopped. The spectacle outran the reality. This is the key structural vulnerability of the Gesamtkunstwerk: when the core philosophy is compromised, the entire world begins to dissolve. Missteps in expansion are survivable if the foundation remains secure. An artist who makes a misstep and returns to their centre retains their capacity for traversal. An artist who makes a misstep and lets it pull their centre out of alignment loses their world entirely.
The Gesamtkunstwerk must constantly shapeshift, but always from a secure philosophical centre. Nietzsche’s foremost concern was that the herd wins when the self-legislating creator starts borrowing from the herd’s values. Skepta is his proof.
Several artists are currently in proximity to the fully realised Gesamtkunstwerk without yet having arrived.
Yaku Stapleton has a promising beginning, but the threads his work alludes to haven’t been pulled together into a coherent framework. The expansion is ahead of the foundation. His world isn’t yet defined enough to function as a philosophy for living. What would it take? The philosophy doesn’t need to emerge solely from fashion design. Most simply, it can be explored through writing, laying the red thread between all his work. The philosophy is the final glue that turns separate projects into a traversable world. Once the foundation is stable, expansion becomes possible on its own terms.
Jawnino’s 40 is an accidental masterwork of worldbuilding. Rebuilding London in his own image created such a defined world that it cohered without conscious planning; the transformed elements feel uniquely his, and the world’s texture is immediately recognisable without their framing. But the strongest worlds are generally well-considered; deliberation allows an artist to expand their world while maintaining its philosophy. An accidental world can cohere in a single gesture, but developing it further without conscious understanding of what you’ve made is a harder hold to get. The mark of a deep enough alchemy, however, is the totality of the immediate foundations, and by that measure, 40 succeeds.
Ebun Sodipo is extremely close. Her poem In The Archive (taken from the Toe Rag 06) weaves a personal and political history into a compelling conceptual world; her philosophy — producing “real and imaginable narratives of Black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present and future” — is convincing and clearly generative. The gap is between the writing and the visual art, which relies too heavily on collage of existing quotes and film stills. The philosophy is there. The alchemy isn’t yet total. The question she faces is the same one all these cases pose: not whether the vision is strong enough, but whether every medium of the world has been transformed deeply enough that the seam between source material and creation disappears.
Ellen Poppy Hill’s practice is the clearest proof that the Gesamtkunstwerk keeps its structure at the intimate scale. Her writing, fashion design, and drawing all serve a coherent and philosophically grounded world exploring 21st-century girlhood; specific enough to feel true, open enough to be inhabited by others. Claude Cahun, one of her biggest inspirations, is a precedent for exactly this: a French surrealist who used photography, writing, and performance to explore self-multiplication and identity construction before either had a theoretical vocabulary. Cahun’s practice was itself a Gesamtkunstwerk through its total self-construction that refused easy categorisation. From Cahun to Hill, the framework holds at every scale.
Today we live in a tastemaking economy. Platforms and publications have led to the proliferation of “taste” as the primary cultural currency, reflecting a structural shift in how cultural value is produced and distributed away from critical gatekeeping, toward the construction and navigation of taste universes. In this economy, a total world is more enticing to step inside than an isolated drop. This does not make the single-medium artist obsolete. Andrew O’Hagan writes only literature and writes brilliantly; like any great artwork, he creates worlds through his writing. But a complete multimedia world will always offer more ways of living inside it: multiple points of entry, multiple daily touchpoints. Applying a Deleuzian viewpoint: the single-medium work is a trunk, root system, and canopy; the Gesamtkunstwerk is a rhizome. The transformation must, however, be total enough to constitute a new world, not merely a recombination of existing ones. Virgil Abloh notoriously proposed a “3% rule:” the idea that a 3% change from an existing reference is sufficient to constitute a new work. The Gesamtkunstwerk demands the opposite: a transformation large enough that the source material becomes an unrecognisable, raw ingredient alchemised beyond recovery. The distance between curation and alchemy is the distance between a recombination of existing worlds and the creation of a new one.
One of the deepest challenges to this framework comes from Baudrillard: even a high-degree alchemised world will eventually slide into simulation once enough time passes and cultural context shifts. The transformation that felt total becomes a recognisable style that can be imitated, commodified, and turned into its own simulacrum. How does Wales Bonner’s world avoid this? How does Bauhaus avoid becoming merely a style replicated in airport hotels?
The answer is shapeshifting. The worlds that remain alive have a philosophy that is generative: they continue to produce new work, new connections, new traversals. They cannot be reduced to a single aesthetic signature because the signature itself keeps evolving. The Bauhaus became a style after it stopped shapeshifting (it was forcibly closed by the Nazis in 1933). While it was alive, it was a living philosophy. A world that stops growing calcifies into style and risks becoming exactly what Plato feared: a fixed image of something that was once alive. This is what determines whether the attempt is sustained or merely brilliant. Divinity is not in the attempt itself; it is sustained through ongoing shapeshifting and expansion from a secure philosophical centre. The attempt that stops, or compromises the core, is not divine. The artist who makes a misstep and returns to their centre retains their capacity for traversal. The artist who lets a misstep pull their centre out of alignment dissolves their world.
As humans, we are natural curators — we draw together already existing things into our own world. What makes an artist a great artist is the act of transformation. The transformation must be large enough to constitute a new world, not merely a recombination of existing ones.
The fully realised Gesamtkunstwerk is a framework for living: a consistent philosophy the audience can inhabit and implement into their own lives. The philosophy can consist of, but is not limited to, a set of recurring questions, a texture or sensory signature, a way of seeing, or an emotional or spiritual north star. The form is up to the artist; the implementation is up to the audience.
The artist’s world is fully realised in their own mind before it is opened to others. The act of invitation (opening the world to an audience) is itself a form of shapeshifting, extending the divine traversal between their world and the real world. The audience will always receive it through their own lens, but the wider and deeper the world, the more points of entry, the more thoroughly alchemised, the closer that reception will converge on the artist’s intention.
To build your own world and traverse between that world and the real one is divinity embodied. You encounter the ‘Brat’ world, inhabit it for a season, then it passes. The Wales Bonner world accumulates around you. It is inhabited, and the inhabiting changes your very own world.
A great artist gives you a vocabulary, a texture, and a philosophy to borrow and build your own world from. Not a system to be understood and reproduced, but a territory to be entered and traversed. They leave behind an entire world with an open door, one that continues to shapeshift, and by shapeshifting, stays alive.
The highest-degree Gesamtkunstwerk is the one that makes your own becoming more possible, more deliberate, and more alchemised. It is not a mirror. It is a new vocabulary for your very own shapeshifting and worldbuilding.
“Frameworks for living that expand our freedom to become more fully ourselves” <— this