A Danish conceptual artist, whose work focuses on 'power and inequality' was commissioned to recreate two of his earlier pieces that used scores of banknotes to represent average incomes, from 2007 and 2011 ....
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| Would You Want To Pay For This? |
.... to be displayed in the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art.
For this he was loaned 532,000 krone (£61,500) to be featured as the cash in the two picture frames as well as an artist’s creation fee of about 40,000 krone (which it can be argued he did nothing for).
However they were shocked when the crated works arrived in September 2021, and were opened, they were found to contain two empty frames. They then received an email from Jens Haaning, the artist, stating that he changed the concept, and these were two new original works, entitled "Take The Money And Run" .... my how every one laughed (not!!). Lasse Andersson, the director of the Kunsten Museum said “We are not a wealthy museum. … We have to think carefully about how we spend our funds, and we don’t spend more than we can afford.”
But the museum, while not best pleased by this, said that they hoped that the artist would return the money when the exhibit ended (as promised they said), and displayed the two empty frames. However, it appears that Mr Haaning didn't consider that he should do anything like repay the money, in fact he considered that he had been paid to create two works, and done exactly that.
"Of course I will not pay it back. The work is that I took the money and I will not give it back."
And so it proved, with Mr Haaning refusing to return the loaned money ... however after it was dragged through the courts, on Monday the 18th of September 2023, a Copenhagen court ordered Haaning to return the museum's cash - but struck off 40,000 krone (£4,629) as the reduced artist's fee.
This artists fee was ordered because of the museums silly decision to actually display the blank canvasses alongside the works of other contemporary artists until January 2022 (when Haaning should have repaid the loaned money) ... a costly decision, because he had done nothing to the frames, and so they would have got all their money back if they hadn't displayed them.
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