In the history ofart of the twentieth century There have been several interesting cases of works of art exchanged for common objectswho were brought home or even thrown, exchanged for garbage. This happened also in large museums and during important events.
At the 1968 Venice Biennale, for example, a famous “door” of Marcel Duchamp (who opened and closed simultaneously): a painter, seeing it peeling, thought of giving her a hand of fresh paint, completely altering the sense of the work.
One thing similar to that happened after, in the 80s, when the cleaning staff of the Leverkusen Museum, Germany, cleaned a “dirty” bath of the famous artist Joseph Beuys.
In 2001, an installation of the famous artist was thrown away Damien Hirst exhibited at the Eyestorm Gallery in London, because it was exchanged for garbage: it was composed of beer bottles, coffee cups and full asoneri.
In 2004, always in England, a part of a work by the German artist Gustav Metzger was also thrown into the trash, exhibited in an exhibition at Tate Britain, Because of the appearance: a black bagexposed right alongside the rest of the work.
But don’t believe that these things happen only abroad: in 2014 a cleaning investigation threw away two works exhibited in the contemporary art review Mediating Landscape display in Bari, why He confused them with newspaper and cardboard remains.
The following year something similar to the Museion of Bolzano happened: here the large installation created by the duo of artists Goldschmied and Chiari, entitled Where are we going to dance tonight?was dismantled by the cleaning staff after being exchanged for the remains of a evening party before. And actually that was the sense of installation, composed of cigarette butts, empty champagne bottles and confetti. The work, all packaged and ready to be disposed of, has been reconstructed.
Unfortunately, this kind of errors also affects the visitors. In 2022 a 72 -year -old woman noticed A blue work jacket hanging on a wall of the Picasso Museum in Paris. He thought that someone had forgotten it there, so he took it home and even made him adapt to his own size. In reality, the jacket, created by the artist Oriol Vilanova, was a work, and was exhibited as part of the exhibition Picasso à L’Image: in the pockets there were also postcards, depicting the artist’s works, meticulously collected by Vilanova.
What did you learn from these errors? Little, if we consider that Also in 2024 there was a victim of confusion between waste and art objects. Let’s talk about Alexandre Lavet’s work All the good Times We Spent Together: consisting of two small “beer cans” with a crushed appearance, this sculpture (realistically painted with acrylics) was exhibited at the LAM museum in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, a member of the museum staff exchanged the work for garbage, throwing it into the bucket. Difficult to think that it will be the latest victim of this (frequent) exchange of identity.