Artist delivered a museum two blank canvases, titled "Take the Money and Run," and now has to pay back $81,000

boing
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Originally published at: Artist delivered a museum two blank canvases, titled "Take the Money and Run," and now has to pay back $81,000 | Boing Boing

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Reboing:

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Putting the con in conceptual art.

I’ve seen worse art, TBH.

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Artwork tittle checks out; maybe the artist needs to run faster though.

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obligatory soundtrack in my head:

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The original project sounds like something that a hedge fund art student would cook up. The blank canvases, on the other hand, have potential.

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Animated GIF

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Having been around the art world for a bit, that sounds like an extraordinary high sum for a fairly minor museum to spend on any exhibition or art production project. The typical scenario is that museums just about covers the cost of travel and logistics.

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Is it art or is it chutzpah?

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5,700€?

That isn’t that much in a Danish context.

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Didn’t think “Art is whatever you can get away with” was meant to be taken so literally.

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Yeah, I meant the full amount. The loan must have been taken from a budget somewhere, and the amount is fairly high for any budget post in a publicly funded museum. And if the assumption was that the artist would be able to pay it back, were the museum perhaps hoping the work would sell after the exhibition? At this point they will have an incentive to not just exhibit the piece, but also promote it and this is where you’re entering a grey area. Would be perfectly OK if they were a commercial gallery, but in a publicly funded gallery this is definitely not great.
As for the fee, I just looked up his bio and while niche, the artist is not a complete nobody so a decent artist’s fee would be in order. Fair play to him for commanding such a high amount, but $5,700 is still stiff compared to what I have seen elsewhere in the industry. Anything above $4000 is quite good methinks.
My guess is that the story here is about a curator getting far too involved in the actual making of the piece, and in the process overstepping several professional boundaries they shouldn’t have.

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Yep, seen the price of their beer?

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You could get a huge pile of Spandauer for that kind of money.

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I live in Norway. People here literally go to Denmark for the cheap beer

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