If you’ve never understood the hoopla behind conceptual art, a Danish artist known for critiquing power structures in society just taught the world a masterclass on using art to provoke a conversation.
The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, advanced the artist Jens Haaning 534,000 kroner, or roughly $84,000, to reproduce a pair of his older mixed-media artworks. According to a written agreement obtained by Artnet, Haaning was supposed to use actual banknotes from his payment to recreate two pieces, “An Average Austrian Year Income” from 2007 and “An Average Danish Annual Income” from 2010, to compare the average annual incomes of an Austrian and a Dane.
Instead, Haaning pocketed the cash and presented the museum with two empty whiteboard frames, cheekily renaming his series “Take the Money and Run.”
Haaning told the Danish radio program P1 Morgen last week that the blank canvasses were a protest against his meager payment, pointing out he’d have to use nearly $4,000 of the euros and Danish kroner he was paid simply to recreate the artworks.
Oh, the irony. The works were meant to show pay as “an instrument to measure the value of work,” explains the museum. “Does the money seem mind-boggling when the full wage is experienced as a physical format, or not, at all?”
Haaning insists that this was no cheap stunt. “The work is that I have taken their money,” he told the Danish radio program P1 Morgen last week. “Breach of contract is part of the work.”
The museum says Haaning must return the money. “If we don’t get it back, we will have to file charges against the artist,” Lasse Andersson, the museum’s director, told The Guardian.
Then again, can the museum claim breach of contract after deciding to go ahead and display the blank canvasses? Through January 16, 2022, visitors to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art can see Haaning’s empty frames on full view in “Work it Out,” an exhibition about the future of the labor market. Doesn’t that indicate the museum’s acknowledgement that Haaning’s latest pieces are indeed art?
The exhibition “rethinks the role of art and the art museum in relation to society,” says the museum’s website. “The project focuses on how contemporary art can contribute to a debate about the working life of the future.”
Moreover, the Kunsten museum cannot claim it didn’t know who it was working with. “Jens Haaning’s work is socio-critical, based on ideas, tackling topics such as capitalism, globalization, democracy, racism, and structural inequality,” reads the artist’s bio on the museum’s website, which summarizes Haaning’s newest artworks as “cool cash and a cool aesthetic.”
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September 29, 2021 at 08:20PM
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An Artist Was Paid $84,000 By A Museum—And Delivered Two Blank Canvasses - Forbes
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