Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses
bbc.com
bbc.com
"He stirred up my curatorial staff and he also stirred me up a bit, but I also had a laugh because it was really humoristic," the museum's director, Lasse Andersson
So the museum director was happy, curators were interested and they were on display - feels like the money was his?
“The artist shall utilise the bank notes to visually reproduce a specific artwork, such as the Mona Lisa. The bank notes should form the actual colours and contours of the artwork, and the final piece should not be a mere abstract interpretation.”
Maybe it did and that’s why they got the money back, but if not I’d side with the artist
He was asked to reproduce it for 2021 using the money given
That’s the whole point of the lawsuit. The artist broke the terms of the contract.
You don’t think they’d hand him a giant pile of cash, ask nicely for him to give it back, and hope for the best, do you? These commissions will have clear contracts about deliverables, ownership, and rights assignment.
The guy was paid less than $6K for his work. He was not handed a "giant pile of cash" either, but he will now have to pay back the cash that the museum (for whatever reason) lent him, along with the legal costs amounting to ~$11K.
More amusing if the artist burnt the money and used the ashes to create an artwork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
" K Foundation Burn A Million Quid....... compiles stills from the film, accounts of events and viewer reactions, and an image of the brick that was manufactured from the fire's ashes. A film consisting of a static three-minute shot of the brick, "This Brick", was shown at London's Barbican Centre prior to Drummond and Cauty's [The K Foundation] performance as 2K in the same year."
The criminal individual was not even punished, he just have to return the stolen goods and still get paid. If the museum had not chosen to display the canvas, I feel it would be fair to require damages on top of the money returned in full, without pay deducted and with interest.
The fact that it made some people mad and they don't understand, or at least appreciate it, is not proof that it's the highest form of art, but it is absolutely consistent with it.
Violating expectations is very much one (of many) purpose of art, and holding up "contract" doesn't change that. That's just a handy club that happens to be available in this case and you're willing to wield it to club something you don't like. Another legal c word is "context". No one can argue something like this wasn't always a possible interpretation, complete with prior examples.
So the court and some sufficient number of the voting population aren't artists and the only thing they see is money and a canvas? That is the least interesting and least valid proof of worth or validity of a piece or work of art ever. Just like all the people who say "It's just splatters, I could do that!". That only makes them common and in possession of a club, not right.
Crime is unacceptable and is not to be glorified as art.
Especially not this kind of lowly and outright pathetic attempt at crime.
They provided money to get an artistic statement about money, which they got, and which the executor/commissioner/agent both accepted delivery of, and displayed.
Did they charge any ticket or membership fees to enter the gallery where the accepted work was displayed? Did they return that collected money to the patrons?
Crying "crime!" is a weak argument. Jaywalking is a crime.
The criminal was not ordered to "just make art", but comissioned to make a specific piece requested by the gallery - in the form of a frame filled with said money. As such, this is no different than if you hired a carpenter to build you a house, paid upfront with contractual obligations, but the carpenter then just ran off with the money without doing anything. Or if you hired an individual and gave them access to company accounts for the purpose of doing their job, which they then embezzled and ran away with.
The money was loaned for a contractually described use-case with a return date. Walking away with it with no intention to return - and trying to keep it afterwards when sued - is nothing but theft of a significant sum.
I find it kind of strange that they don't want to keep these talking points but I think the court should have decided what value they already got out of using them if they don't permanently accept them.
The limited traction they'd get from this story and empty frames would already have played out - that 100k USD can do more good as commission to other, actually skilled artists for future works than padding one greedy criminal's pockets...
Well I have some news you may want to sit down for. Law is just a tool. A tool that was designed, manufactured, and finally wielded by people.
It gets worse. There is no such thing as any tool that was designed perfectly, or functions perfectly, or wielded perfectly.
We use it only because it's all we got and the best we can do. Chaos is worse. But all we got and the best we can do is actually quite garbage.
It's not worth your unthinking worship, and your unthinking worship does not make the world a better place.
I guess this artwork works in both directions.
Well, the context is they paid him to reproduce previous works, such as "An Average Danish Year Income, 2010" [1] which was literally comprised of 278500 Danish Kroner, mounted and framed.
If he's contracted to produce something, and decides to produce something different instead, it seems pretty clear the money wasn't his.
Interestingly, he's not the first artist to frame cash and put it in an art gallery - for example K Foundation's money-as-art works, "Money: A Major Body Of Cash" [2]
[1] https://www.sabsay.com/artists/43-jens-haaning/works/9668-je... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation#Money:_A_Major_Bo...
You cannot mention this without also mentioning "K Foundation Burn a Million Quid".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
And yes, they really did do it. (This was the same blokes who, at the top of the UK charts, as an artistic statement deleted their entire music back catalogue, meaning you could no longer buy their music. In 1992, that really did mean no more sales of their music and no more profit for them.)
The contract decides who owns the money. It doesn’t matter if the museum director was amused or not. The money didn’t belong to the museum director, it belonged to the museum. There is no loophole in the law that says you get to keep the other side’s money if you can make them laugh in the process.
This is a straightforward breach of contract case.
Or maybe the museum could claim their lawsuit was also an art piece entitled “The Power of Contract Law” and then all of the critics of this decision would be happy again?
However, as it now turns out the money was only "lent" to the artist, so it wasn't his to retain. THAT is the reason that the reaction of the director isn't relevant.
Examples off the top of my head:
John Cage "composed" a song consisting of just silence.
Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal which he simply purchased from a store.
Yves Klein exhibited 11 paintings that were exactly the same. They were simply blue, no structures or subject. But he priced them all differently.
I can't remember the name, but I recently read about a photographer who exhibited nothing and then made photos of confused faces during the exhibition.
I can't remember which art prize it was, but there once was an art price which asked artists to "make a piece of art that represents your country". And a female artist wrote back "Dear jury, just give me the art prize for my reputation. You can keep the money in return. This would also represent my country as we have so much corruption here". And she won.
For lack of artistic value, are all highly regarded by critics and art audiences.
For lack of mometary value, they've been sold for very expensive prices...
Critics and art audiences: totally no "opinion monopoly" or manufactured consent at play, right?
Monetary value? You mean money laundering?
As to the value and validity of the opinion of critics and art audience, surely the most import opinion about just about anything is the opinion of the intended audience.
Regarding the fulfilment of expectation of the intended audience: I agree that it is an important aspect, but it will not make art good, merely makes it marketable. I have a feeling that museums are only serving as means of advertisements, to keep the perceived brand value of these items (and people) high. Criticising it is just as dangerous for this, as remote work is for the real-estate bubble. Criticists are stakeholders in this game, as well as the authors and the buyers. Their livelihood depends on the public agreeing to, or at least accepting the valuation of these items.
I think the real art in (post)modern art is this control of the public opinion, a large illusionistic trick. To me it seems similar to the "crypto" scam, so NFTs were kind of a perfect post-modern works of art! (when they were novel)
Probably, as I prefer the standard dictionary one.
>Monetary value? You mean money laundering?
I also mean the traditional art buying public, before the 70s when modern random figures came into the picture, when money laundering wasn't needed and money laundering laws and checks where almost or entirely non-existent. Did Peggy Guggenheim and other such figures do it for money laundering?
>Critics and art audiences: totally no "opinion monopoly" or manufactured consent at play, right?
As opposed to the non-manufactured consent or opinion plurality of Joe Random?
you made me chuckle, thanks!
> Did Peggy Guggenheim and other such figures do it for money laundering?
Kind of? https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
> As opposed to the non-manufactured consent or opinion plurality of Joe Random?
It is funny while postmodernism is all about deconstruction and questioning existing values, social structures and authorities, when its authorities are questioned by an outsider, it becomes so defensive...
Not that funny in this case, since this has nothing to do with "postmodernism".
The artists that did those things we discussed were peak modernism. Dada/surealism (Duchamp), or nouveau réalisme (Klein) for example, and of course the entirety of data, lettrism, etc. have nothing at all to do with postmodernism.
In fact post-modernism, both when taken as a critical stance and as an artistic theory, was precisely against modernism (that those artists represented).
Could you cite some well-known artists that are postmodern and lack originality? Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Basquiat, Richter? I understand if you don't like postmodern art but not original isn't a criticism in my eyes.
I used to think 4'33" was the most ridiculously arrogant piece of pseudo-art in the history of pseudo-art.
But people still talk about it today, 70 years after it was composed [0], and they will still be talking about it 500 years from now. So I've changed my mind. It does exactly what good art is supposed to do: It makes you ask questions.
“The Course Of Empire” is a beautiful piece of art for many reasons: it’s clearly masterful, it represents complex ideas simply, it conveys emotions we lack words to convey, it beautifully displays the human experience, and so on. It’s art even if you didn’t have a human to experience it - it’s self evident.
Taping a banana to a wall isn’t art. A silent song isn’t art. These are just childish, amateurish displays only enjoyed by a nihilistic culture devoid of meaning. If what you make only counts as art because it “starts a conversation” about how stupid and garbage and insulting it is, then it’s not art at all.
We did. By making it relevant here.
> Taping a banana to a wall isn’t art
The one thing baser than taping a banana to a wall is people categorically, doubtlessly concluding that it is or isn’t art.
It isn’t art for you. That this point needs to be made almost singularly means that I do consider it art, if only on the first iteration. (Anyone could have done it. But Cattelan did.) I’ll sidestep the question, too, of whether any comedy is art.
Unless we’re elevating art to a Kantian ideal like math, or arguing it’s subject to the scientific method, art has to be subjectively judged. If that’s true, anyone drawing hard lines is bloviating or attempting coercion.
I have more sympathy for the claim that it's not "good art", not particularly interesting or meaningful.
With regard to the banana I tend to agree. This was just a small provocating artpiece which doesn't bring anything to the table and is unlikely to be discussed much in ten years, let alone 70.
4:33 however is still very much discussed 70 years later and will continue to be, and that may be because it's not just a random joke but fits within the work of an important composer (John Cage) which contributed significantly to the artistic debate of what "is" music, at a time where this question was suddenly much less clear than it had been in the past (i.e. the same piece today would be much less meaningful).
If an artist paints a wall white, and that doesn't induce any emotion, then it's not art.
If an artist paints a wall white and then tells you "hey, this is art", and that induces anger or frustration in you because you disagree, then it becomes art.
When the person above implies that this "makes you ask questions", the question in this case is "what is art?", which, as mentioned, is a contentious and interminable topic which itself arouses emotion, making it good fodder as a topic for art.
But if the alleged artists taping bananas to walls tell us that's the measure to judge art by, who am I to question their wisdom?
4'33" is intended to be "performed" for an audience, and the sounds created by the audience, and any other ambient sounds are the music. Another major aspect of the work is that it blurs the lines between composer, performer and audience. In traditional classical music, the performer interprets the written work by the composer and the audience just listens, but there's no particular reason that all music has to work like that.
Sometimes if it's really quiet I can hear something that seems to pulse at about the right speed that it could be blood flowing, so I don't find that very hard to believe? Or am I hearing something else?
Have you ever spent meaningful time alone in an anechoic chamber? Your ears are similar to your eyes, in that they have mechanisms to adjust to ambient noise (/light) levels.
If you are in very deep silence for a long enough time, your brain starts trying to make sense of the sounds you are hearing (which indeed includes your blood flowing in your ears [0]), potentially causing auditory hallucinations. It can be a profound experience.
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/02/02/inside-the-worlds-quietest-roo...
In Hong Kong, they were being detained and limited from protesting no matter what signs they were holding up, so someone had the idea of holding up blank pieces of paper. It's brilliant because it shows how oppression works - they still detained people - and the paper isn't explicitly saying anything political but still somehow it is. The implementation is easy (or low effort), but the idea itself is where the value is. And you have to come up with it.
I was surprised to find myself quite taken by it! It really is a striking colour, and an imposing presence overall!
I think about it all the time, and picture it in my house at least once a month.
It’s not low effort.
Unless that’s what you brought as a consumer of the art!
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/14/time-art/
I think the moral of the story that whatever the domain, you can pull the low effort stuff in a profound way provided you put in the enormous leg work needed in proving your reputation in the high effort stuff.
I would have thought choosing to exhibit the two pieces after inspecting them would be seen as acceptance by the museum.
He's quoted as saying the musemum gained a lot more in publicity without mentioning the publicity he himself got while stealing the museum's money.
“The artist shall utilise the bank notes to visually reproduce a specific artwork, such as the Mona Lisa. The bank notes should form the actual colours and contours of the artwork, and the final piece should not be a mere abstract interpretation.”
-Andy Warhol
https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Chesnutt_Baxt...
It would be awful for Europe as a whole to become beaurocratic and dull, because eu commission and parliament already are boring enough