Take the money, do no work, and declare it art?
If you get paid to turn money into art but you keep the money and claim that providing nothing but a blank canvas in return is art, is the act a masterpiece, a scam, or a crime? A Danish court thinks it’s at least a partial breach of contract.
We begin the story in 2021. Danish artist Jens Haaning made a piece of modern art out of money, and when a museum offered to hand over more money for him to use in a second work, he pocketed the cash and sent them blank canvases instead — and instead of being outraged, they hung the blank canvases and called them art:
When staff at the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg loaned artist Jens Haaning 534,000 Danish krone (the equivalent of $84,000), they expected him to create a new version of a previous artwork in which he framed a large amount of cash to illustrate the difference between annual income in Denmark and Austria. Instead, Haaning came back to them with two blank canvases titled Take the Money and Run. “I actually laughed as I saw it,” museum CEO Lasse Andersson tells NPR’s Bill Chappell.
According to Euronews’ Tom Bateman, a museum spokesperson says the institution has a written agreement with Haaning that the money must be returned when the exhibition ends on January 16, 2022. But the artist tells Danish radio program P1Morgen that he has no plans to repay the cash. “The work is that I have taken their money,” he says.
This is the scam that is so much of modern art, taken to its logical end: Take the money, keep it, do no work, and declare it art.
Lasse Andersson, the museum director, agrees that Haaning’s work is appropriate for collection but stipulated that his decision to take the money for himself violates their legal agreement. “I want to give Jens absolutely the right that a work has been created in its own right, which actually comments on the exhibition we have,” Andersson told “P1 Morgen.” “But that is not the agreement we had.”
But Haaning is standing strong, noting that his decision is what makes the empty frames works of art. “It’s not theft,” Haaning said. “It is a breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work.”
I would not advise you to try that argument in court. It didn’t work for Haaning: “After a long legal battle, the artist was ordered to refund the court 492,549 Danish kroner — or $70,623 U.S. dollars. The sum is reduced to include Haaning’s artist fee and the cost of mounting the art.” The legal principle is pretty straightforward: The money was supposed to be a loan of materials, so he has to give it back, but because the museum accepted the work and displayed it, it deserved to get scammed out of the artist’s fee for his creating . . . blank canvases.
We’ve doubtless all enjoyed a laugh or two at the self-evident absurdity of this sort of “art.” Sure, it may well be worth a few pennies to be in on the gag now and then, but who is not appalled by the vast sums and praise lavished on things that require no skill to compose, have only whatever meaning the viewer insists on imposing upon them with minimal help from the “artist,” and in some cases consist almost entirely of an open plot to rip people off while doing the minimal possible amount of work?
The fundamental root of the crisis of the visual arts of painting and sculpture is, of course, technology. For millennia, painting and sculpture were among the most honored of the arts: demanding tremendous skill, growing in sophistication, and patronized by the powerful, the wealthy, churches, and entire communities. Until the middle of the 19th century, there existed no other way in which to memorialize the images of people, places, and events. Moreover, most people had not traveled far, so if an artist succeeded in capturing the image (or the imagined image) of some faraway person, place, or event, it could be burned in the imaginations of viewers with no point of comparison.
The advent of photography, which burst upon the scene in the late 1830s, began to shatter that. Photographic portraits soon supplanted painted ones; beginning with the Crimean War and the American Civil War, war journalists captured battlefields. It took time for the technology to become widespread and advanced enough to do away with the painters and the sculptors, but each successive step — such as lithographs, newspapers that printed photos, color photos, and movies — brought forceful competition to the art of the traditional painter or sculptor. Improved travel in the age of railroads and steamships meant that more people could see places on their own. On top of this, the decay of monarchy and aristocracy deprived painters and sculptors of their most lucrative and reliable patrons, while the decline of religious piety eroded the world of religious artwork. Ironically, all of this happened in an age that saw the explosive growth of museums, in which the public could now view in great numbers the works of the painters and sculptors of earlier ages. Those museums are still worth visiting, for an appreciation of the skill that went into those works. Moreover, even a photograph of an artwork can’t give you a full sense of the size, scale, and (in the case of sculpture) three dimensions of the work.
The representative figure of this era, in some ways, was Samuel Morse. Originally a portrait painter by trade, Morse got interested in telegraphy on a return voyage from Europe in 1832. His purpose for the trip was emblematic of the pre-photography age: He was painting miniature copies of 38 of the Louvre’s best paintings to display to Americans who couldn’t see the originals. The first photographs were taken by French pioneers Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre between 1826 and 1838; the invention was publicized in August 1839, when the French government announced that it was making the process available “free to the world.” It was introduced to America by Morse, who had visited Daguerre while in Paris to promote the telegraph. (Unfortunately, Daguerre’s workshop and most of his early work and papers were destroyed in a fire while he was away watching Morse demonstrate the telegraph.) The combined power of the camera and the telegraph destroyed the very trade that had made Morse’s first career.
The cruel irony for painters and sculptors (as well as calligraphers) was that the successive ages of new technology proved a boon to many other arts. Cheaper printing and binding technology, newspaper serialization, and the spread of literacy created a mass market for novels that hadn’t existed before Charles Dickens. Film, TV, and faster travel have all done wonders for the lives of dramatists, comedians, and actors, giving back much more than they took away. Printed sheet music allowed Stephen Foster to become the first American composer to make a living from songwriting, and recorded music made fortunes and household names out of singers and musicians. But the world of painting and sculpture, beginning with the Impressionists, has adapted through a series of artistic movements each less directly tied to representation of reality than the last. The result is characters such as Jens Haaning, who have not only turned grifting into an art but have almost eliminated the part where there is an artwork that can be used as an excuse for the grift.