Take the Money and Run
artist has to repay $71K to Museum
Jens Haaning's new work Take the Money and Run is a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions. The valuation of art can be about the name of an artist, which gallery the artist is affiliated with and what art collections the work is a part of. The work can therefore both be seen as a critique of mechanisms within the art world, but also points to larger structures in our society. All as an item that can be calculated in monetary unites. Even the lack of money in the work has a monetary value when it is designated as art and thus shows how the value of money is an abstract quantity.1
A court in Copenhagen has ruled that Danish artist Jens Haanning2 must repay the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark $71,000 for delivering two empty frames in 2021 rather than updating commissioned artworks as agreed in a contract. The artist had argued that the breach of contract was a conceptual work he called Take the Money and Run.
Once Art became about theories, interpretations, social and political positioning, once every artwork came with a long explanation larded w jargon, this was its inevitable end.
Or: once Art could be anything it became nothing, and once being an artist didn't involve talent, skill, technique etc it meant anyone could be an "artist", which explains such 21st-century masterpieces as the guy who canned his own shit or the many female "artists" who consider exposing their breasts and genitals "art".
Wake me when and if Western culture ever exits its "infants dancing on the grave of the Old World" stage, which if it were a person, would be able to apply for Social Security by now.
Isn't that what Bitcoin is about?