An artist has lost a lengthy battle with a Danish museum after he submitted two blank canvases and walked away with borrowed cash that was meant to be displayed in the artwork.
Danish artist Jens Haaning has been ordered by a Copenhagen court to pay Queenstown Museum of Modern Art 500,000 Danish kroner (approximately $76,500) after his audacious act triggered nearly two years of legal action, with media including British Broadcasting Corporation and NPR the report said.
The works feature two artworks by Haaning originally debuted 2007 and 2010 – known as Austrian average annual income and Average annual income of Danes, A review of the average salary of workers in Denmark and Austria respectively, and contains banknotes totaling these amounts.
The Aalborg Museum commissioned Haaning to recreate these artworks for its exhibition solve this problemwhich asks visitors to ask what they want from their careers and plans to contribute a total of 534,000 kronor in cash for the 2021 exhibition.
Haaning took out a bank loan to create his original work, but this time the museum offered to loan him the full amount, 534,000 kronor, The Art Newspaper 2021 coverage.
But instead of receiving a re-creation of the original, the museum opened the artwork and discovered two blank canvases bearing the new collective’s name: Take the money and run away.
Haining Customs Denmark Export Dr.dk The new artwork aims to highlight how underpaid people are for their jobs and encourage cashiers to take away from the register and operate in the same spirit.
The contract stipulated that the money would be returned to the museum after the exhibition, but Haning made it clear in advance that this would not happen. Instead, the artist literally took the money and ran away.
“The job is I take their money,” Hanen told dr.dk ahead of the contract’s January 2022 end date.
He told dr.dk that the piece would cost him 25,000 kronor in its original form, which provoked his rebellion.
Museum director Lasse Andersson told Dr.dk Haaning that despite being considered to have artistic value, there was no right to keep the money because the agreement only included an artist fee of 10,000 kronor and a fee of 6,000 kronor.
“We’re not a rich museum,” Anderson previously told this guardian. “We have to think carefully about how we spend our money and we don’t spend more than we can afford.”
However, Haning argued that the museum made more than half a million crowns from a two-year campaign to promote the work. Northern TV reports.
In fact, Kunstein praised the submitted work websiteconsiders it a “critique of the inner workings of the art world, but also points to the larger structures in our society.”
At the time, museum director Anderson acknowledged seeing the funny side of the submission.
“He pissed off my curatorial staff and pissed me off, but I also laughed because it was really humorous,” Anderson told the BBC.
While the Copenhagen court ultimately sided with the museum, it did deduct Haning’s fees and mounting costs from the total amount. Still, the decision left the artist deeply in debt.
“It was great for my work, but it also put me in an uncontrollable situation where I really didn’t know what to do,” he told dr.dk.
There was no immediate response from a museum representative. wealthRequest for comment.
There is a long and tense history between artists’ visions for designing works and museums curating exhibitions.
One of the latest examples is Banksy’s 2018 artwork Love in the trash can.An original work by this mysterious artist, titled girl with balloonsoriginally sold at Sotheby’s in London for £1 million (approximately $1.2 million).
Unbeknownst to the buyer, once the winning bid was confirmed, Banksy’s portrait would self-destruct by being torn into pieces by its own frame.However, this painting return auction in its new form and sold for an eye-popping £16 million.
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