When Contemporary Art Is Mistaken for Trash

Should art be thrown in the trash to become art? A Dutch museum recovered an artwork that looks like two empty beer cans after a staff member accidentally threw it in the bin. One man’s art is another man’s trash...

Is the cleaner to blame for not recognising your art and thinking it was garbage? Are you to blame for not making it clear enough, leading the cleaner to throw it away? Or is art itself to blame for becoming trash?

At the very least, people would start writing about it as the artwork that ended up in the trash.

Millions of people might learn about you, see your other works, and suddenly become interested.

I’m lucky that my mother is embarrassed by my art and takes down my paintings when her granddaughters come to visit — it’s kind of like throwing them in the trash, but no one will write about it except me in this newsletter.


This strange trend could soon create the most profitable profession in the art world — someone hired to throw your painting in the trash.

We’ll have professional “art vandals” who toss selected works into bins and create enough buzz around them to finally get your art noticed.

You might not even need to pay for it.

It could be enough to upset some eco-activists who pour soup on your work — and at least then you’ll have something to eat.

It’s worse if they throw paint on the canvas, but the artwork will almost certainly gain attention and maybe even value — if not among collectors, then at least among opponents of the climate protest movement.

Climate activists throw soup on two Van Goghs, just hours after others are sentenced to jail.

By the way, the cleaner was probably lucky that this particular artwork didn’t immediately turn the accident into a much bigger cultural or political controversy.

If the artist had belonged to a marginalised group, or if the work had dealt directly with gender, race or identity, the public reaction could easily have become much more heated.

Instead, he accidentally became something close to an art critic.
Lol.

It’s a shame that, in situations like this, the person committing the act can become more interesting than the artist who made the work.

And that’s the real problem.
The creator is pushed into the background again.
The story becomes bigger than the artwork.

And in this case, the artwork almost stops belonging to the artist at all —
because now it feels like it can’t exist without the trash bin.

...your worst artist and best friend,

hEhe and my contemporary art criticism

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