Artist who took museum’s money and ran loses Danish court case
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An empty frame hung up at the Kunsten Museum in Aalborg, Denmark, on Sept 28, 2021.
PHOTO: AFP
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COPENHAGEN – A Danish artist who pocketed the cash he received from a museum to incorporate into an artwork must pay the roughly 530,000 kroner (S$103,700) back, a court said.
Jens Haaning should still get paid 40,000 kroner for the piece – two blank frames – which the museum ended up putting on display,
Haaning agreed with Kunsten, a museum in northern Denmark, in 2021 that he would borrow the cash to replicate his earlier work that displayed the annual incomes of an Austrian and a Dane.
But when the museum opened the box that Haaning had shipped, the cash was missing and the artwork’s title had been changed to Take The Money And Run.
Haaning declined to return the cash, so the museum took him to court.
Interviewed on TV2 Nord television on Monday, Haaning said the museum had made “much, much more” money than what it invested, thanks to the publicity surrounding the affair. BLOOMBERG, AFP
