A woman stands in front of an empty frame hanging at the Kunsten Museum in Aalborg, Denmark, September 28, 2021. Henning Bagger—Ritzau Scanpix/AFP
An artist has lost his long-running battle with a Danish museum after submitting two blank canvases and absconding with the loaned money that was supposed to be displayed inside the artworks.
Danish artist Jens Haaning was ordered by a Copenhagen court to pay the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art 500,000 Danish crowns (about $76,500) after his audacious stunt sparked a nearly two-year legal battle, reports said. media including the BBC and NPR.
The pieces were based on two artworks that Haaning originally released in 2007 and 2010, called Average Austrian annual income And An average Danish annual income, respectively – which were a commentary on the wages of average Danish and Austrian workers, and contained banknotes totaling these sums.
Aalborg Museum had commissioned Haaning to recreate these artworks for its Work it Out exhibition, which asked visitors to ask themselves what they wanted from their careers, and was supposed to hold a total of 534,000 crowns in cash for an exhibition in 2021.
Haaning had taken out a bank loan to create his original pieces, but on this occasion the museum offered to lend him the entire sum of 534,000 crowns, The arts journal reported in 2021.
But instead of receiving a reconstruction of the original works, the museum opened the work to discover two blank canvases bearing a new collective name: Take the money and run.
Haaning told Danish newspaper dr.dk that the new artwork aimed to highlight how people were underpaid for their work and to encourage checkout staff to step up and operate in the same spirit .
The agreement in the contract was that the money would be returned to the museum at the end of the exhibition, something Haaning had made clear in advance would not happen. Instead, the artist actually took the money and fled.
“The job is that I took their money,” Haaning told dr.dk ahead of the contract’s end date in January 2022.
He told dr.dk that the work, in its original form, would have cost him 25,000 crowns, which would have motivated his revolt.
Museum director Lasse Andersson told Dr.dk Haaning that he had no right to keep the money despite its perceived artistic value, because the agreement only called for an artist’s fee of 10 000 crowns and 6,000 crowns for expenses.
“We are not a rich museum,” Andersson previously told Guardian. “We need to think carefully about how we spend our funds, and we don’t spend more than we can afford. »
Haaning, however, argued that the museum had earned well over 500,000 crowns from the two-year publicity campaign the work had created, NordTV reported.
Indeed, Kunsten praises the submitted work on his website, saying that it acts as “a critique of mechanisms within the art world, but also points to larger structures within our society “.
At the time, museum director Andersson admitted to seeing the funny side of submission.
“It excited my conservation team and it also excited me a little bit, but I also laughed because it was really humorous,” Andersson told the BBC.
Although the Copenhagen court ultimately sided with the museum, it subtracted Haaning’s fees and the escalating cost from the sum. However, this decision leaves the artist heavily in debt.
“It has been good for my work, but it also puts me in an unmanageable situation where I don’t really know what to do,” he told dr.dk.
A representative for the museum did not immediately respond to Fortunerequest for comment.
There is a long and tense history between the vision of the artists who design a work and that of the museum which organizes an exhibition.
One of the most recent examples is Banksy’s 2018 work. Love is in the trash. The original work of the enigmatic artist, entitled Girl with balloonoriginally sold for £1 million (about $1.2 million) at auction at Sotheby’s in London.
What the buyer didn’t know was that the Banksy portrait was about to self-destruct by being shredded through its own frame as soon as the winning bid was confirmed. However, the painting returned to auction in its new form and sold for a whopping £16 million.
