Danish Artist Takes Museum's Money for Conceptual Artwork and Runs Away

An empty picture frame by artist Jens Haaning, is on display at the museum Kunsten in Aalborg, Sweden.

Artist was given tens of thousands of dollars by a museum to reproduce an old sculpture. Instead, he pocketed the money and called it a new conceptual artwork.

A Danish artist has pocketed $84,000 in cash that he received from a museum to incorporate into artwork and changed the name of the installation to “Take the Money And Run.”

Haaning, a conceptual artist whose work focuses on power and inequality, was commissioned by the museum to recreate two earlier works that used bank notes to represent average incomes. A 2007 work, An Average Danish Annual Income, displayed krone notes fixed to the canvas in a frame, and a second 2011 work about Austrian incomes used Euro bills.

However, when the museum opened up the box containing Haaning’s piece, they found two empty frames. The banknotes were absent.

“The work of art is that I took their money,” the artist says. 

Haaning explained that he conceived Take the Money and Run in response to the paltry remuneration offered by the museum for inclusion in the show. 

The commissioned artworks were intended to form part of an exhibition at the museum about the relationship between art and labor. Running from Jan. 16, the exhibit features new and existing works from about 20 artists and occupies the majority of the museum.

The museum, which decided to display Haaning’s new work despite its loss of thousands of dollars, insisted that the missing money was not a stunt to promote the exhibition. 

Museum wants Haaning to return the cash, but he’s declining. 

Jens Haaning is a Danish conceptual, contemporary artist living and working in Copenhagen. Haaning has produced a body of artworks since the 1990s, which – when seen together – offers an acute reflection of a complex and changing society in the West.