With the world of art being as silly and subjective as it is, how is it that I can’t recall having ever heard a story like this one before. It seems like such an obvious stunt to pull once you hear it.
A Danish artist has pocketed 534,000 kroner ($84,000) in cash that he received from a museum to incorporate into an artwork and changed the name of the installation to “Take the Money And Run.”
Jens Haaning had agreed with Kunsten museum, in northern Denmark, that he would borrow the money to replicate earlier work which displayed the annual incomes of an Austrian and a Dane. But when the museum in Aalborg opened the box that Haaning had shipped, the cash was missing from the two glass frames and the artwork’s title had been changed.
Some may see this piece as little more than brazen robbery, however myself and other sharp-eyed critics trained in the fine detail and nuance of the genre prefer the term straight up fuckin’ genius.
While I’m kind of rooting for him to keep every penny of it because so many of these art people are just such gargantuan, pretentious assholes, the museum is not. They’re considering reporting him to police if the money isn’t returned by the end of the exhibition in January. How they plan on convincing anyone that the art is not art when you’ve got regular ass benches on display in art galleries is unclear.