Documenta 12

And what's more the event has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. First of all, street cleaners removed a work by Lotty Rosenfeld, which consisted of white crosses taped to the road.

Less than a week later a 12-meter-high (30-foot) open-air artwork, Template, fell over in a storm. Making a virtue out of necessity, the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, said he found it best as a flattened pile of wreckage and asked that it be left that way for the rest of 100-day exhibition.

Inclement weather took its toll again on Tuesday when a vast plastic greenhouse, erected as a temporary pavilion and criticized as "cheap," turned out to have leaked -- without, however, causing any damage to the art inside.

Bad publicity

One Munich-based tour operator Studiosus has threatened to take the organizers to court for allegedly stopping the company's own guides showing visitors around the exhibition even though official tours are booked out.

Nevertheless, the Documenta 12 director Roger Buergel appeared unperturbed, or is, at least, determined to put on a good front.

"I am very happy with the first half," he said. "We have managed to divide the public."

Thirty years ago, the German show was able to lure big names such as Joseph Beuys, Salvador Dali, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Most of the artists in this year's exhibition are largely unknown in western Europe. Many come from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and South America.

Buergel called it "Slow Art" and said it was his goal to reduce the visitors' pace and let them savor the works.

Harsh words

But in an interview with regional radio station Hessischer Rundfunk, art collector Rolf Ricke called this year's Documenta as the "most boring, conservative, insignificant and humorless exhibition" that he had ever seen.

He added that rather than dealing with contemporary topics, the artworks at the Documenta preferred to be preoccupied with themselves to a degree that was "so embarrassing that I could cry."

The head of Wiesbaden Museum, Volker Rattemeyer, has criticized the way that the exhibition is arranged, saying that the art works have been hung together in a "completely unconnected" fashion. He also described Documenta 12 as expressing "a certain degree of helplessness".

Public thumbs-up

But for all that, the public seems to like it. During Documenta's first 50 days, 330,000 visitors had walked through its gates. Buergel also said he has not overheard any critical remarks about the artists or the exhibition.

But the curator said he has also realized that the exhibition does have its flaws. While he constantly likes to point up the educational character of his Documenta, there is no kind of background information to accompany the works -- apart from the name of the artists, the year of production, the work's dimensions and its title. Now he is planning to rectify that.

Documenta 12 runs until Sept. 23.