Artist Forced To Pay Back $75,000 After Submitting Two Blank Canvases To Museum

Artists have a reputation for pulling off outrageous antics, but one offended the art community by sending two empty canvases to a gallery.

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There is no denying the huge economic worth of the art industry, where works of art are frequently valued more for their financial potential as investments or tax benefits than for their artistic value.

But Danish artist Jens Haaning attempted a prank by submitting two blank canvases with a delightfully direct name, which may be read as a humorous commentary on how commercialized art has become.

An update of Haaning's series An Average Austrian Year Income, 2007, and An Average Danish Annual Income, 2010, was requested by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, back in 2021.

The actual money earned as an average annual salary was used to create the components.

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The museum lent him 534,000 Danish kroner, or roughly $75,000, for the version to be shown in Denmark.

It was agreed that after the show, the money would be returned and placed in the artwork, but Haaning soon made it apparent that would not happen.

Haaning submitted two bare white canvases rather than the two frames containing the notes.

And the name? 'Take the Money and Run'. Touché.

Credit: Niels Fabæk/Kunsten Museum of Modern Art

Compared to what he had initially been asked to create, Haaning asserted that the piece was really better, more in line with the theme of the exhibition, and presented important issues.

He asked: “Do we have to work for money, or can we just take it? Why do we go to work? All these kinds of things make us start to reflect on the cultural habits of society that we are part of."

Haaning has now been ordered by a judge to repay the money after a legal battle lasting nearly two years. 

It goes without saying that the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art did not share this viewpoint.

A Copenhagen court ordered Haaning to reimburse the museum for 492,549 Danish kroner, or about $70,000, on Monday after he rejected the museum's request.

Despite the issue, museum director Lasse Andersson earlier said that he had laughed aloud when he first viewed the two empty canvases in 2021 and that he still chose to exhibit the pieces.

"He stirred up my curatorial staff and he also stirred me up a bit, but I also had a laugh because it was really humoristic," Andersson told the BBC's Newsday program in 2021.

This is not the first time an artist has pulled a similar act.

At one infamous auction, Banksy's painting Love is in the Bin, a framed creation of his Girl with a Balloon, was destroyed when the bidding reached $1.21 million.

You might assume the buyer was terrified, but that doesn't seem likely given how much the act increased the work's worth. Later, it was returned to auction in its shredded shape and sold for $19.4 million.

It is up to each individual to determine if the piece's message is negated by the stunt's enormous growth in value.