The Beanery is a life-size, walk-in artwork created in 1965 by the American artist Edward Kienholz; it has been referred to as his greatest work, and "one of the most memorable works of late 20th-century art".[1] It represents the interior of a Los Angeles bar, Barney's Beanery.
Modelled at two-thirds the size of the original Beanery,[2] it features the smells and sounds of the bar, and models of customers, all of whom have clocks for faces with the time set at 10:10. Only the model of Barney, the owner, has a real face. Kienholz is quoted as saying "The entire work symbolizes the switch from real time (symbolized by a newspaper) to the surrealist time inside the bar, where people waste time, kill time, forget time, and ignore time".[2]
First exhibited in the parking lot of the bar in October 1965,[3] it is now in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.[4] It was restored in 2012.[5]