Joseph Beuys

He rose to international prominence in 1982 as the artistic director of Documenta 7 in Kassel in Germany, where, among much else, he championed new painting.

The show featured emerging talents such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, as well as works by German and Italian neo-expressionists, but left a lasting impression on the Kassel landscape by commissioning Joseph Beuys to make his public tree-planting campaign 7,000 Oaks, where 7,000 trees were planted by Kassel citizens and installed next to basalt rocks.

Fuchs later became the artistic director of the Castello di Rivoli near Turin, directed the Gemente Museum Den Haag, now the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and then the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Rein Wolfs, the Stedelijk's current director, said that Fuchs, quote, "...brought a clear, uncompromising vision to Amsterdam, rooted in a fundamental belief in the autonomy of the artwork and the direct encounter between the viewer and the art." The Victoria and Albert Museum, or V&A, has drawn up plans to dismantle much of the V&A Academy, a significant part of its adult learning program, by the end of the year, the art newspaper has learned.

The essay argues that this return is not a rejuvenation, but a culmination, the endpoint of several historical collapses that have shaped contemporary art for more than half a century.

Beginning with Alan Kaprow's dissolution of the boundaries between art and ordinary life, Williams traces a lineage through Joseph Beuys and into a contemporary art culture in which discipline becomes procedure, artistic transformation becomes management, and withdrawal becomes therapeutic self-maintenance.

Zittel, in this account, represents the fully institutionalized endpoint, a practice ideally suited to an art system organized around circulation, explanation, administration, and continued production.

The central question is therefore not simply whether the work succeeds.

And they were talking once, they were talking twice.

And at the time, I didn't know who was Joseph Beuys.

And at some point, I raised a hand and I said, I'm sorry, who is this guy? They stopped eating.

They, you know, with all the spaghetti ravioli and all the pasta suspended in the air and started laughing at me.

I worked in one of the best consulting companies, have become the youngest marketing director, blah, blah, blah.

And then they laugh at me because I don't know one name from the art world.

It turns out that Joseph Beuys is one of the key figures in the history of contemporary art.

And so it was from their point of view, a little bit embarrassing that I didn't know.

Whether driven by appetite, curiosity, or simple reflex, these are innate behaviors with oversized consequences, just creatures doing what comes naturally, with artworks in their paths.

So let's take a look at just a few examples of animal attacks, beginning at the New Gallery in Kassel, Germany, which features an iteration of Joseph Beuys' 1969 conceptual artwork, The Pack.

Installed by Beuys himself in 1976, this room-sized piece features a Volkswagen van alongside 24 wooden sleighs, each with torchlights and felt blankets rolled up and fastened by leather belts.

A felt suit and an additional felt blanket hang from the ceiling above.

And then he was the checkout guy.

And so I would just buy some sketch pads, but walk away with a great Joseph Beuys catalog or some sort of something.

I mean, they had great group show catalogs from museums in Europe.

And they just had a really good selection.

It was a working drawing.

And of course, when I look at it today, it looks like a Joseph Beuys drawings.

It looks like some avant-garde German drawing of the 1970s or '80s.

But, um, uh, would I have preferred a beautiful Madonna's head? Of course, but that would've been $75 or $80 million, and we, we, we would've not been able to acquire it.