– Votive Installation dedicated to Joseph Beuys-

“St. Joseph, make a miracle!”

With SHAMAN, perform a miracle!, Fabrizio Ruggiero stages a votive installation that is at once reverent and mischievously subversive. Dedicated to Joseph Beuys, the work adopts the language of devotion while quietly laughing at the rituals of the contemporary art market — a system increasingly adept at transubstantiating artists into brands and brands into financial derivatives.

Here Beuys appears not as a saint to be embalmed by speculation, but as a critical ghost haunting the altar of today’s art economy. The irony is gentle but precise: candles burn not to sanctify, but to expose. Ruggiero illuminates the curious alchemy by which dealers and speculators convert artistic intention into market value, metamorphosing creators into “stars” whose luminosity is measured less in ideas than in auction results.

Beuys famously conceived art as Soziale Plastik, a social sculpture capable of reshaping society itself. Yet the contemporary system, Ruggiero suggests, has largely abandoned this transformative ambition. In its place, it offers an arena where aesthetics and ethics engage in a rather awkward dance — one that too often ends with integrity being politely shown the door.

In this altar, devotion collides with disillusion. The artist is no longer merely a producer of objects, but a moral agent whose conduct and creation are inseparable. Ruggiero’s installation proposes, with a wink and a raised eyebrow, that perhaps what we truly need today is not another miracle of market performance, but a resurrection of ethics — preferably without inflating yet another speculative bubble in the process.

Installation elements:

The Shaman – Joseph Beuys fresco portrait
Fresco on wooden panel
cm 130 × 160

The altar
cm 220 × 100 × 70
Faux pietra serena

100 handmade wax candles
Felt on the altar