Book: APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART

Joseph Beuys: the definitive approach

How to ‘get’ (!)— for once and for all – what it was he was up to

Joseph Beuys, for the cover of Wirtschaftswoche [Business Week] 43/76 1976

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Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) — Germany’s greatest contemporary artist by far — has been variously described as difficult to understand, obscure, and bordering on the incomprehensible. And there can be absolutely no doubt that his artworks — installations, performances, vitrines, displays, drawings, sculptures, readymades, videos, whatever; you name it — defy simple decodings and everyday explanations, and that anyone who can give you a ‘this means this, and this means that’ –type of explanation of a Beuys artwork has no idea what they are talking about, and probably thinks the Mona Lisa is great art, Picasso an amazing genius, and Gerhard Richter ‘very profound and psychological’.

The point is that Beuys’s art is not easy to understand, but that doesn’t mean that ordinary people — like the rest of us — can’t appreciate and enjoy his mystifying presentations. It’s the weirdly distinctive impenetrability…