Another great essay by the great Theodore Dalrymple in Taki’s Magazine, this one on junk art. Here’s an excerpt:

            “Empty Frames”

“Only a couple of weeks after the draping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a Danish self-designated artist called Jens Haaning has exhibited a work, or possibly two works (depending on how you look at it, or them), called Take the Money and Run. They consisted of two empty frames, one larger than the other.

“Haaning had previously exhibited two works, An Average Danish Annual Income, which consisted of Danish currency notes (lent by a bank) in a frame, and An Average Austrian Annual Income (likewise in Euros). The Aalborg Kunsten Museum of Modern Art asked him to reproduce these great works for an exhibition at the museum to be called “Working It Out” and paid him $85,000 to do so.

“The artist, however, thought it would be more interesting – for whom he did not say – to create a new work rather than copy or repeat the old, hence the two empty frames. The museum asked for its money back, but the artist refused. I must say that in the dispute between them, my sympathies are with the artist. He was like one of those highly colored insects that proclaims its poisonousness to all would-be predators; no one who gave him $85,000 could have thought that he was going to get a Velasquez or a Vermeer in exchange. And in fact, Mr. Haaning, wittingly or unwittingly (I suspect the former), performed a useful social service by exposing the fatuity of the way in which, in our contemporary conditions, money for the arts is doled out by the supposed keepers of the flame….

“It then occurred to me that the episode suggests a way forward for Western art.”

To read the entire essay, click here.