There’s an art to guiding museum tours — and this guide is one very haughty artist.
A staffer at Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast art museum puts on a twice-monthly “Grumpy Guide” tour by which the surly instructor deliberately insults and belittles his guests — to their utter bemusement.
Joseph Langelinck’s “highly unpleasant” tours cost around $8 USD, they usually’ve reportedly sold out every session since they launched in May, with bookings well into 2026.
Throughout the 70-minute walking tour, Langelinck — not an actual person however the alter ego of performance artist Carl Brandi — wags his finger in guests’ faces, admonishes them for being on their phones or taking a seat, and mocks their ignorance while going through the museum.
“I never insult visitors directly, based on their personality or their appearance, but I insult them as a bunch,” Brandi, 33, told The Guardian.
“My contempt is directed at an inferred ignorance that won’t even exist. But I attempt to make them feel as ignorant as possible.”
Brandi credited the attraction’s popularity to the “emotional ride” of his off-putting presentation.
“Everyone knows comedy or cabaret formats where the performer’s bad mood or aggressive attitude is essential to the show, it’s just not something we’re used to seeing in museums,” he explained. “And in contrast to in a comedy show, there’s no barrier between the character and the audience here.”
Brandi even gave Langelinck an entire character backstory: He’s a distant relative of Johann Wilhelm von der Pfalz, the Elector Palatine, whose vast collection provides many of the artworks on display.
Langelinck appears disgusted by society’s misgivings about art, similar to the notion that it’s only “entertainment.” The audience comes to understand that his character’s severe approach comes from his ruptured ego.
The Guardian reporter Philip Oltermann experienced Langelinck’s unpleasant demeanor firsthand during a recent tour by which Brandi’s pet persona stopped next to a Renaissance sculpture of a person with a picket club and asked his group to call which mythical hero was being portrayed.
“Hercules?” a lady within the front sheepishly asked. Langelinck responded to the soft-spoken answer with, “In the event you know the reply, why can’t you tell us in a way that those on the back can hear you, too?”
He then challenged 62-year-old Corinna Schröder to call the 12 Labors of Hercules in chronological order. When she couldn’t do it, Langelinck responded with a watch roll.
“Oh god, I feel like I’m back at college,” Schröder sighed.
By the top of the tour, the Langelinck character appears to be on the verge of a breakdown, ringing the bell inside a plaster bell tower, made by the artist Inge Mahn in 1971, furiously.
Museums are in search of recent and inventive ways to draw younger audiences and more people normally, and Kunstpalast director Felix Krämer felt inspired to rent Brandi after seeing the viral success of restaurants with purposefully “rude waiters,” like Karen’s Diner.
“In effective art museums, there may be all the time a form of power imbalance between the museum’s assertion that ‘we will resolve what’s value seeing here’ and the visitors, who roughly should comply,” Brandi shared.
“And to show this power imbalance on its head and say what some people might consider anyway after they go to a museum — that the museum has no idea, they’re just showing you anything — I feel people find that refreshing.”
