Danish Artist Ordered To Repay Over $61,000 After Supplying Museum With Two Blank Canvasses for Project Named ‘Take the Money and Run’
A Danish court ruled that an artist must pay back a museum that provided him 70,000 euros in cash in exchange for artwork but received blank canvases instead.
The Kunsten Museum in the western city of Aalborg hired Jens Haaning to recreate two pieces using cash (Danish kroner and euros) to reflect the annual salaries in Denmark and Austria.
However, Haaning merely gave the museum blank canvases back and said his creation was titled “Take the Money and Run.”
Lasse Andersson, the director of the museum, recently recalled how he laughed aloud upon seeing the two empty canvases in 2021 but still chose to exhibit the pieces.
He said they were “a reflection on how we value work” and had a “humoristic approach,” but he also stated the museum would sue Haaning in court if he didn’t return the money, which he refused to do.
A Copenhagen court ordered the 58-year-old artist to reimburse the museum for the amount it had given him minus the artist’s fee and the mounting cost.
However, Haaning said that the museum had generated “much, much more” money than it had invested as a result of the controversy in an interview with TV2 Nord.
‘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 added.
Initially, the museum believed the artist intended to include the banknotes it gave him into an installation they had commissioned from him.
However, when the artwork was finally displayed, museum employees were startled to discover only a large, empty frame.
Haaning stated: “It’s not theft” immediately after the canvasses were first made public. It is a contract violation, and violating contracts is part of the job,’ he said.
“I did the work by taking their money,”
Haaning, who was born in Hoersholm in 1965, became well-known in the 1990s for his art that examines socioeconomic class distinctions and power hierarchies. He had previously produced works in which he used banknotes as a medium of representing workers’ annual salaries.
The museum anticipated that Haaning would use the cash it loaned him to duplicate his earlier work by arranging the bank notes into two picture frames, which would represent the average yearly income of a person in Denmark and Austria and be included in the “Work It Out” display.
The majority of the museum is taken up by the exhibition, which runs from September 28 to January 16. It includes both new and old pieces by roughly 20 artists.
However, right before the piece was scheduled to make its debut, the museum received an email from Haaning confirming that he had taken the money and would not be returning it.
A museum representative added, “Thereafter, we could determine that the money had not been put into the work.”
Lasse Andersen, director of Kunsten, told DR in 2021 that while he felt Haaning had produced an intriguing piece of art and that the museum would keep the empty frames on display, legal action would be taken if the artist did not reimburse the museum by the agreed-upon deadline of January 16, 2022.
“I concur with Jens that a work in its own right has been produced, one that genuinely makes a statement about the exhibition we are hosting. However, that was not our arrangement, he added.
Currently, we wait and watch. We will, of course, take the required actions to ensure that Jens Haaning complies with his contract if the money is not returned on January 16 as planned.
According to Andersen, the contract between the artist and the museum stipulated that the museum would pay up to €6,000 in expenditures, but that the artist’s exhibition fee was around €1,340.
Haaning said that he seized the money in response to his subpar working conditions and that he would have had to spend £2,850 of his own money to finish the piece because of the museum’s pitiful remuneration.
“It [returning the money] won’t happen.” He admitted to taking their money to Danish broadcaster DR as his “work.”
“I encourage other people to do the same if their working conditions are as miserable as mine.”
‘If they’re sitting in some sh***y job and not getting paid, and are actually being asked to pay money to go to work, then grab what you can and beat it,’ he said.
