A girl stands in entrance of an clean canvas hung up on the Kunsten Museum in Aalborg, Denmark, in 2021. Danish artist Jens Haaning despatched the museum clean canvasses underneath the title Take the Money and Run.

Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP through Getty Ima

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Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP through Getty Ima

A girl stands in entrance of an clean canvas hung up on the Kunsten Museum in Aalborg, Denmark, in 2021. Danish artist Jens Haaning despatched the museum clean canvasses underneath the title Take the Money and Run.

Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP through Getty Ima

In autumn 2021, a Danish museum opened two massive crates to examine two works it had commissioned from the artist Jens Haaning.

But when museum employees pulled out the canvases — a brand new work the artist had knowledgeable the museum was titled Take the Money and Run — the canvases had been fully clean.

The museum, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in ​​Aalborg, had given Haaning a mortgage of 532,549 Dutch krone, the equal of about $76,400. The cash was for use to recreate two earlier works by Haaning that depicted — in precise chilly, exhausting money affixed to canvas in a body — the typical annual revenue of a Dane and an Austrian, and the sizable hole between them, reflecting wage variations throughout the European Union.

Now, Haaning has been ordered by a Copenhagen court docket to repay many of the cash — roughly $70,600 — in addition to the equal of a further $11,0000 in authorized charges.

“I am shocked, but at the same time it is exactly what I have imagined,” Haaning told Danish public broadcaster DR on Monday.

“We are not a wealthy museum,” Lasse Andersson, the museum’s director, told The Guardian in 2021, explaining that the cash got here from reserves earmarked for the constructing’s repairs. “We have to think carefully about how we spend our funds, and we don’t spend more than we can afford.”

The court docket’s judgment deducted roughly $5,700 from the complete mortgage quantity to function Haaning’s artist’s charge and viewing charge, for the reason that museum nonetheless exhibited the clean canvases in its “Work It Out” present.

The Kunsten Museum’s curators appeared to totally perceive Haaning’s which means.

“Haaning’s new work Take the Money and Run is also a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system that values ​​a work based on some arbitrary conditions,” the museum says in its exhibition information. “Even the missing money in the work has a monetary value when it is called art and thus shows how the value of money is an abstract quantity.”

Haaning now seems to be in a little bit of a pickle, as he says that he does not have the cash to repay the museum.

“It has been good for my work, but it also puts me in an unmanageable situation where I don’t really know what to do,” the artist advised DR.