Originally published at: Oops! Museum worker tosses two beer cans in the trash — not realizing it was art - Boing Boing
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Looking at that picture, I almost think maybe the artist intended for this to happen at some point. Honestly, I’m surprised a patron hadn’t already mistaken them for trash and thrown them out.
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Hey, if you want your art to elicit a response…
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All The Good Times We Spent Together by the French artist features two two aluminimum cans
British people may have thought they were being all fancy with the added i, but ArtReview shows you how it is really done. 
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Modern Art Is Rubbish, part 97.
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Joseph Beuys is having a bit of a giggle in whichever astral sphere is right now.
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Andy Warhol said “art is what you can get away with.” Apparently this piece didn’t get away with it.
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Assuming they were displayed on the floor like in the picture, I really can’t blame the staff. If they don’t want it to happen again, at least put them on a pedestal or something. It won’t look as natural but apparently the art is a little too perfect for its own good at the moment.
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- This would have yielded me millions!
And 2) Shouldn’t a basic custodians course include: “These are the areas to avoid”?
- Seems staged. See #2 above.
(Sigh)
“Everyone’s a critic.”
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… “by” is sure doing a lot of work in that phrase
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The true crime was that the worker threw the cans in the trash and not the recycle bin.
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Headline should say “…not realizing THEY WERE art”.
I was fullyexpecting a story about a trash can as art!
Parse, parse, parse, people!
I do not blame the guy who disposed of them. Without a little 'interpretation" label on the wall behind them, how was anyone supposed to know?
I didn’t even catch that as I’m used to skipping over the last part of this particular word, because I always read it as aluminium in my head, no matter how it is spelt.
Probably one filled with grease and felt
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Yeah, it’s become a recurring theme in the art world that someone will stage a pile of actual rubbish or rubbish-adjacent materials as a “conceptual art” installation and some custodian will throw it out accidentally, but this was not that. Someone actually spent a lot of time and effort crafting the fake beer cans.
Reminds me of the plot of How to Steal a Million, where Audry Hepburn posed as a cleaning lady in an elaborate scheme to steal her grandfather’s (forged) sculpture from a museum.
They were on display in the elevator.
No they weren’t. Like the description says, the elevator technician just saw them on the floor as he was passing by and tossed them into the trash in a well-meaning effort to help keep the place tidy.
ETA: Not in the elevator itself, but apparently on top of its transparent ceiling. Apparently most of the photos circulating about the piece were from a different exhibition or something.
