Artist Gives Museum Two Blank Canvases After Being Paid $84,000 to Produce an Art Piece

An artist gave a museum two blank canvases and made off with the thousands he’d been paid to produce an art piece.

“Take the Money and Run” is exactly what an artist did to a museum, but it’s also what he named the blank canvases that he delivered to them. A Danish museum called Kunsten Museum of Modern Art paid Danish artist Jens Haaning $84,000 in a commissioned piece. Instead of actually getting creative and producing an art piece, he got creative and took the cash, only leaving the museum with two blank canvases that he titled “Take the Money and Run.”

Haaning is actually a real artist. After taking an interest in two of his art pieces from 2010, the museum asked Haaning to recreate them. On top of the $84,000 Haaning was given, the museum offered an additional $7,000 if he needed it. Haaning’s two recreated pieces were set to be a part of the museum’s current exhibition “Work It Out.” The New York Post reports that the money was supposed to be returned to the museum after the end of the exhibition on Jan. 16, 2022.

In an interview with CBS News, the museum’s director, Lasse Anderson, said, “The money had not been put into the work.”

“The work is that I have taken their money,” the nada-Vinci said during a char with the Danish radio program “P1 Morgen.” “It’s not theft. It is a breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work.”

Haaning says his actions were all part of his protest against the amount of money he had to pay to be included in the show. Reports show he had to pay nearly $4,000. “‘Take the Money and Run’ questions artists’ rights and their working conditions to establish more equitable norms within the art industry,” reads a press release from Haaning.

“Everyone would like to have more money and, in our society, work industries are valued differently,” said Haaning. “The artwork is essentially about the working conditions of artists. It is a statement saying that we also have the responsibility of questioning the structures that we are part of. And if these structures are completely unreasonable, we must break with them.”