Real Life magazine that is.
Following up on the post immediately below, An Art World Where The Price Is The Art: "The emerging dream of an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction" which links to Real Life's April 19, 2021 essay "Paid in Full"
From the New York Post, September 29, 2021
Museum pays artist $84K — he delivers 2 blank canvases titled ‘Take the Money and Run
It was a case of art imitating heist.
Just in case you thought charging $120,000 for a banana was highway robbery, a Danish museum gave an artist $84,000 to use in a commissioned piece — only to have him pocket the cash and turn in two blank canvases cheekily entitled “Take the Money and Run.”
The blank robbery occurred after the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg asked Danish artist Jens Haaning to re-create two of his prior works: 2010’s “An Average Danish Annual Income” and “An Average Austrian Annual Income,” first exhibited in 2007, CBS News reported. Those politically charged pieces used actual banknotes to showcase the average incomes of citizens of Denmark and Austria, respectively.
The reboots were slated to appear in “Work it Out,” a current exhibition on the role of artists in the labor market, according to ArtNet. Along with an undisclosed compensation for the project, the institution lent Haaning $84,000 — plus offered an additional 6,000 euros (about $7,000), if needed — to be displayed in the opus itself.
Per the contract, that amount would have to be returned to the museum at the end of the exhibition on Jan. 16, 2022.
But the curators first suspected something was amiss upon receiving an email from Haaning that said he had changed the artwork’s name to “Take the Money and Run.” Indeed, when museum staffers opened up the box containing Haaning’s contributions, they discovered two blank canvases — while the cash had disappeared entirely....
....MUCH MORE
Now I'm reasonably well-centered [he said delusionally] but this is getting a bit trippy.
