"Is that art or garbage?" is an expression often heard in Germany when arguing about art. The background: the artist Joseph Beuys built an installation using five kilos of butter at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. When the Fat Corner began to stink, the resolute janitor removed what he saw as garbage. Damage: € 40.000. Here are more stories about creative work:
Johann Koenig – a gallerist who sees nothing
Cologne
It sounds like a bad joke: A gallerist who can’t see anything? But that's how Johann Koenig's began his career. At the age of eleven, he lost almost all of his eyesight in a fireworks accident, but at the age of 20, he founded a gallery anyway. He could not have seen a Rembrandt, so he had his artists explain their often abstract installations. From the discussion, he could decide whether the works were appropriate for him. Art was a movie in his head.
Art in a bunker
Berlin
The Nazis were confident of their cause when they had the bunker built on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin-Mitte. Their plan: The gloomy building was to be a symbol of the resistance of the German people after they won the war. That's why they had the protective concrete building decorated to look like a castle with battlements on the roof and small firing slits in the walls.
Museum of Fantasy
Lake Starnberg
A flying swan floats through the entrance hall of the Buchheim Museum taking visitors on a fun journey through a truly adventurous museum! The collections of the museum's founder, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, painter, photographer, publisher and novelist, are not bound by strict rules, they simply want to make you enjoy art.
Judy Lybke – a man who stood naked in the doorway. For a good reason.
Leipzig
He stood naked in the doorway, back-combed his hair into a bird's nest and added three eggs. That’s how Gerd Harry Lybke, whom everyone just calls “Judy,” opened his first exhibition in 1983 in Leipzig.
