Wonderfully Weird Art

Yup, I think I've fulfilled my quota of wonderfully weird, absolutely absurd, superbly strange art for the week.

There's an exhibit called "Soma" on at the Hamburger Bahnhof (a contemporary art museum; nothing to do with hamburgers). It's set up in the museum's huge main hall and consists of... reindeer. Twelve reindeer. Live ones.

There are also twenty-four canaries, eight mice, two houseflies... all arranged around the space in symmetrical halves. It's supposedly an attempt to recreate soma, a psychedelic drink mentioned in ancient Hindu texts, by feeding psychoactive toadstools to the reindeer and collecting their urine. Yes. And truly adventurous (and wealthy) art lovers can even spend the night in the museum, on a raised bed between the two reindeer pens, for 1,000 euros a night.

I went to the exhibit with an American friend who used to live in Berlin and was back visiting; we had fun puzzling over the strangeness of modern art and boggling at the idea that someone actually funded this (though at 1,000 euros a night to sleep in the exhibit and with the entire run already booked up, maybe the whole thing kind of pays for itself?) but at the end of the day, we had to admit we were happy to be in a country that's big on funding the arts.

(Incidentally, there are of course doubts about whether the reindeer are actually being fed poisonous mushrooms - the website does describe it as a "hypothetical experiment.")