| Summary: | The celebrations to mark the centenary of Joseph Beuys’ birth in his native country, Germany, have been accompanied by a similar polarization that marked the reception of his work. The following is an analysis of the discussion that arose when his retrospective exhibition, held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980. Our objective is to show that the work of this artist became the arena of discussion on the prevalence of the tenets of the Avant‐garde in artistic practices at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties in the United States and Germany, that is, in the years in which the restructuring of capitalism generated the perception that the utopian energies, characteristics of modernity, had been exhausted. To this end, we will review the arguments of authors such as Hans Magnus Enzeseberger, Jürgen Habermas, Andreas Huyssen, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster and Peter Bürger, who participated in the debate from different spaces of reflection and places of enunciation.
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