what's up with joseph beuys

today i went to an exhibition in the main contemporary art museum in my city. it's in an old train station and the main hall usually features large installations. currently, it is filled with lots of equally sized wooden cubes. the entire floor is covered in them and they are just laying around in piles for people to build something with them. at first, i just walked around and looked at what others had built. i was a bit intimated. it smelled really good, as one would expect when there is so much fresh wood around. i loved how there were children there, also impressed by the size of it all, walking around in awe and then loosening up and starting to build something for themselves or playing in it.

people had built some really impressive things. for some reason, i felt like it wasn't for me to do the same, which is obviously ridiculous. i kept trying to come up with new things to build that weren't there yet and whenever i had an idea, i saw someone else had already done it. after some time, i decided to just pick up some blocks and see where it would take me. i started experimenting with how little i could make the blocks overlap while still being able to stack them and just like that i had built a tower. it was really fun and i loved how collaborative it was and how many people seemed deeply engaged in creating something.

then i went into another exhibition, where they exhibited works by shilpa gupta, whose work i just found incredibly flat. one piece was a bunch of giant letters spelling the word "truth", but in the wrong order, one of them laying down on the floor, symbolizing how truth depends on perspective. i don't know man. the only piece of hers that i liked was one where she asked people to draw the borders of the country they were from and then superimposed ones belonging to the same country over each other. they looked cool and i liked the idea. all her other art seemed like it was made to be photographed for an instagram story. the entire aesthetic was so clean and boring and none of it really made me think.

right next to her works, were some pieces and recordings of performances by joseph beuys. i don't know if i've ever seen an exhibition of his, though i obviously know his name as one of if not the most famous german artist of the late 20th century. first thing i gotta say is that he genuinely looks like a movie villain in his trenchcoat and hat and with his sunken in face. i found his ideas about art mostly very confused, the weird appropriations he tries to do of the notion of capital, equating it with creativity. i suspect he's never read a word of marx. and though i sympathise with his idea of everyone being an artist, i just can't shake the feeling that there is something sinister about him and his weird concepts of democratising the world through art. on top of the fact that he was a volunteer for the nazis and kept being into stupid anthroposophic stuff. i don't get why people consider him so special.

it's funny, contemporary art really opened my eyes to what visual art could mean and there's still a lot of stuff i really like, but today i felt like maybe it's getting to a point where this is not that thought-provoking to me anymore. though maybe i also just saw the wrong exhibitions.