In the history oftwentieth century art There have been several interesting cases of works of art mistaken for common objectswhich were taken home or even thrown away, mistaken for rubbish. This happened even in large museums and during important events.
At the 1968 Venice Biennale, for example, a famous “door” of Marcel Duchamp (which opened and closed at the same time): a painter, seeing it peeling, thought of giving it a fresh coat of paint, completely altering the meaning of the work.
Something similar to what happened later, in the 1980s, when the cleaning staff at the Leverkusen Museum in Germany accidentally cleaned a “dirty” bathtub belonging to the famous artist Joseph Beuys.
In 2001, an installation by the famous artist was thrown away Damien Hirst exhibited at the Eyestorm Gallery in London, because it was mistaken for rubbish: it was composed of beer bottles, coffee cups and full ashtrays.
In 2004, again in England, part of a work by the German artist Gustav Metzger, exhibited in an exhibition at the Tate Britain, was also thrown in the garbage. because of the appearance: a black sackdisplayed right next to the rest of the work.
But don’t think that these things only happen abroad: in 2014 a cleaner threw away two works exhibited in the contemporary art exhibition Display Mediating Landscape in Bari, why he confused them with newspaper waste and cardboard remains.
The following year a similar thing happened at the Museion in Bolzano: here the large installation created by the artist duo Goldschmied and Chiari, entitled Where are we going to dance this evening?was dismantled by cleaning staff after being mistaken for the remains of a party the night before. And indeed that was the meaning of the installation, composed of cigarette butts, empty champagne bottles and confetti. The work, all packaged up and ready to be disposed of, has been rebuilt.
Unfortunately, this type of error also affects visitors. In 2022, a 72-year-old woman noticed a blue work jacket hanging on a wall in the Picasso Museum in Paris. He figured someone had forgotten it there, so he took it home and even had it adjusted 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 was learned from these mistakes? Not much, if we consider that even in 2024 there was a victim of the confusion between waste objects and art. Let’s talk about the work of Alexandre Lavet All the good times we spent together: Made up of two small, crushed-looking “beer cans”, this sculpture (realistically painted with acrylics) was on display at the LAM museum in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, a member of the museum staff mistook the work for rubbish and threw it into the bin. It is difficult to imagine that he will be the last victim of this (frequent) identity swap.