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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 in which the surly instructor deliberately insults and belittles his guests — to their utter bemusement.
Joseph Langelinck’s “highly unpleasant” tours cost around $8 USD, and they’ve reportedly sold out every session since they launched in May, with bookings well into 2026.
During the 70-minute walking tour, Langelinck — not a real person but 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 group,” Brandi, 33, told The Guardian.
“My contempt is directed at an inferred ignorance that may not even exist. But I try to make them feel as ignorant as possible.”
Brandi credited the attraction’s popularity to the “emotional ride” of his off-putting presentation.
“We all know comedy or cabaret formats where the performer’s bad mood or aggressive attitude is key to the show, it’s just not something we’re used to seeing in museums,” he explained. “And unlike in a comedy show, there’s no barrier between the character and the audience here.”
Brandi even gave Langelinck a whole character backstory: He’s a distant relative of Johann Wilhelm von der Pfalz, the Elector Palatine, whose vast collection provides most of the artworks on display.
Langelinck appears disgusted by society’s misgivings about art, such as the notion that it’s only “entertainment.” The audience comes to realize that his character’s severe approach comes from his ruptured ego.
The Guardian reporter Philip Oltermann experienced Langelinck’s disagreeable demeanor firsthand during a recent tour in which Brandi’s pet persona stopped next to a Renaissance sculpture of a man with a wooden club and asked his group to name which mythical hero was being portrayed.
“Hercules?” a woman in the front sheepishly asked. Langelinck responded to the soft-spoken answer with, “If you know the answer, why can’t you tell us in a way that those at the back can hear you, too?”
He then challenged 62-year-old Corinna Schröder to name the 12 Labors of Hercules in chronological order. When she couldn’t do it, Langelinck responded with an eye roll.
“Oh god, I feel like I’m back at school,” Schröder sighed.
By the end of the tour, the Langelinck character seems 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 looking for new and creative ways to attract younger audiences and more people in general, and Kunstpalast director Felix Krämer felt inspired to hire Brandi after seeing the viral success of restaurants with purposefully “rude waiters,” like Karen’s Diner.
“In fine art museums, there is always a kind of power imbalance between the museum’s assertion that ‘we can decide what is worth seeing here’ and the visitors, who more or less have to comply,” Brandi shared.
“And to turn this power imbalance on its head and say what some people might believe anyway when they go to a museum — that the museum has no idea, they’re just showing you anything — I think people find that refreshing.”
