Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#31

Post by dagw »

dizhn wrote: post #17
kawhah wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The museum lent the artist money as well as paying him to produce the works. Accepting the art submitted does not invalidate the artist's requirement to repay the loan.

The"artist" seems like the kind of guy who would easily say the quality of "the material (cash) they gave me wasn't good so I used something else instead. So we're even." He's quoted as saying the musemum gained a lot more in publicity without mentioning the publicity he himself got while stealing the museum's money.

In the original Danish article he is quoted saying the whole affair has been good for him professionally as well

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#32

Post by Aurornis »

ryanmcdonough wrote: post #11
kryptiskt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got to keep his fee, what he didn't get to keep was the cash that he was lent that was supposed to be part of the installation.

He said the work was taking their money, unless the contract specifically said “The artist shall utilise the bank notes to visually reproduce a specific artwork, such as the Mona Lisa. The bank notes should form the actual colours and contours of the artwork, and the final piece should not be a mere abstract interpretation.” Maybe it did and that’s why they got the money back, but if not I’d side with the artist

> unless the contract specifically said

That’s the whole point of the lawsuit. The artist broke the terms of the contract.

You don’t think they’d hand him a giant pile of cash, ask nicely for him to give it back, and hope for the best, do you? These commissions will have clear contracts about deliverables, ownership, and rights assignment.

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#33

Post by grodin »

mg wrote: post #8

This reminds me of a common theme in the art world. I wonder if there is a name for it. Maybe "Low effort art"? Examples off the top of my head: John Cage "composed" a song consisting of just silence. Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal which he simply purchased from a store. Yves Klein exhibited 11 paintings that were exactly the same. They were simply blue, no structures or subject. But he priced them all differently…

A major element of 4'33" is that it is impossible to experience silence. It was partly inspired by Cage's experience in an anechoic chamber. He'd expected to hear silence but could still hear sounds that were coming from himself (the story is that a sound engineer told him the sounds were his bloodstream and his nervous system, but I find it very hard to believe that what he heard was actually either of those things).

4'33" is intended to be "performed" for an audience, and the sounds created by the audience, and any other ambient sounds are the music. Another major aspect of the work is that it blurs the lines between composer, performer and audience. In traditional classical music, the performer interprets the written work by the composer and the audience just listens, but there's no particular reason that all music has to work like that.

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#34

Post by Aurornis »

ryanmcdonough wrote: post #6

Museum director Lasse Andersson said that he had laughed out loud when he first saw the two blank canvasses in 2021, and decided to show the works anyway. "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," the museum's director, Lasse Andersson So the museum director was happy, curators were interested and they were on display - feels like the…

> So the museum director was happy, curators were interested and they were on display - feels like the money was his?

The contract decides who owns the money. It doesn’t matter if the museum director was amused or not. The money didn’t belong to the museum director, it belonged to the museum. There is no loophole in the law that says you get to keep the other side’s money if you can make them laugh in the process.

This is a straightforward breach of contract case.

Or maybe the museum could claim their lawsuit was also an art piece entitled “The Power of Contract Law” and then all of the critics of this decision would be happy again?

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#35

Post by dist-epoch »

mg wrote: post #8

This reminds me of a common theme in the art world. I wonder if there is a name for it. Maybe "Low effort art"? Examples off the top of my head: John Cage "composed" a song consisting of just silence. Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal which he simply purchased from a store. Yves Klein exhibited 11 paintings that were exactly the same. They were simply blue, no structures or subject. But he priced them all differently…

You forgot the most recent one - the taped banana.

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#36

Post by phailhaus »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #18
mg wrote: post #8

This reminds me of a common theme in the art world. I wonder if there is a name for it. Maybe "Low effort art"? Examples off the top of my head: John Cage "composed" a song consisting of just silence. Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal which he simply purchased from a store. Yves Klein exhibited 11 paintings that were exactly the same. They were simply blue, no structures or subject. But he priced them all differently…

Classic postmodern. Shows the lack of something. Usually the lack of originality and the lack of any value.

You're not the audience, artists are. A lot of these pieces play with the assumptions that artists have about how works should be composed, and they turn them on their head. We might not care, but they can inspire artists to make even more creative works that we do like.

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#37

Post by circuit10 »

grodin wrote: post #33
mg wrote: post #8

This reminds me of a common theme in the art world. I wonder if there is a name for it. Maybe "Low effort art"? Examples off the top of my head: John Cage "composed" a song consisting of just silence. Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal which he simply purchased from a store. Yves Klein exhibited 11 paintings that were exactly the same. They were simply blue, no structures or subject. But he priced them all differently…

A major element of 4'33" is that it is impossible to experience silence. It was partly inspired by Cage's experience in an anechoic chamber. He'd expected to hear silence but could still hear sounds that were coming from himself (the story is that a sound engineer told him the sounds were his bloodstream and his nervous system, but I find it very hard to believe that what he heard was actually either of those things)…

> his bloodstream and his nervous system, but I find it very hard to believe that what he heard was actually either of those things

Sometimes if it's really quiet I can hear something that seems to pulse at about the right speed that it could be blood flowing, so I don't find that very hard to believe? Or am I hearing something else?

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#38

Post by FridayNightTV »

michaelt wrote: post #15
ryanmcdonough wrote: post #6

Museum director Lasse Andersson said that he had laughed out loud when he first saw the two blank canvasses in 2021, and decided to show the works anyway. "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," the museum's director, Lasse Andersson So the museum director was happy, curators were interested and they were on display - feels like the…

> So the museum director was happy, curators were interested and they were on display - feels like the money was his? Well, the context is they paid him to reproduce previous works, such as "An Average Danish Year Income, 2010" [1] which was literally comprised of 278500 Danish Kroner, mounted and framed. If he's contracted to produce something, and decides to produce something different instead, it seems pretty clea…

> K Foundation's money-as-art works, "Money: A Major Body Of Cash"

You cannot mention this without also mentioning "K Foundation Burn a Million Quid".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

And yes, they really did do it. (This was the same blokes who, at the top of the UK charts, as an artistic statement deleted their entire music back catalogue, meaning you could no longer buy their music. In 1992, that really did mean no more sales of their music and no more profit for them.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_KLF

Re: Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

#39

Post by InitialLastName »

grodin wrote: post #33
mg wrote: post #8

This reminds me of a common theme in the art world. I wonder if there is a name for it. Maybe "Low effort art"? Examples off the top of my head: John Cage "composed" a song consisting of just silence. Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal which he simply purchased from a store. Yves Klein exhibited 11 paintings that were exactly the same. They were simply blue, no structures or subject. But he priced them all differently…

A major element of 4'33" is that it is impossible to experience silence. It was partly inspired by Cage's experience in an anechoic chamber. He'd expected to hear silence but could still hear sounds that were coming from himself (the story is that a sound engineer told him the sounds were his bloodstream and his nervous system, but I find it very hard to believe that what he heard was actually either of those things)…

> the story is that a sound engineer told him the sounds were his bloodstream and his nervous system, but I find it very hard to believe that what he heard was actually either of those things

Have you ever spent meaningful time alone in an anechoic chamber? Your ears are similar to your eyes, in that they have mechanisms to adjust to ambient noise (/light) levels.

If you are in very deep silence for a long enough time, your brain starts trying to make sense of the sounds you are hearing (which indeed includes your blood flowing in your ears [0]), potentially causing auditory hallucinations. It can be a profound experience.

[0] https://nypost.com/2023/02/02/inside-the-worlds-quietest-roo...

Post reply on HN