Jens Haaning's Take the Money and Run: Blank Canvases and the Court

Jens Haaning's Take the Money and Run Dispute

In 2021 the Danish conceptual artist Jens Haaning was lent about 532,000 Danish kroner in banknotes by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg so he could recreate two of his old money-based artworks. Instead, he sent two empty frames titled Take the Money and Run and kept the cash. Two years later a Copenhagen court ordered him to pay most of it back. Here is the full story, from the commission to the courtroom, and why the case became one of the most talked-about art disputes of the decade.

What Haaning was asked to make

Haaning, born in 1965 and based in Copenhagen, is known for work about money, migration, nationalism and power. Two of his earlier pieces used real banknotes fixed to canvas to show the average yearly income of a worker in Denmark and of a worker in Austria. Hung side by side, they made the gap in wages between two wealthy European Union countries physically visible.

Kunsten wanted to show new versions of those works in an exhibition about labour and pay called Work It Out, which opened in autumn 2021. Because the pieces are literally made of money, the museum supplied the cash: 532,549 kroner, worth roughly $83,000 at 2021 exchange rates. Early reports rounded this to 534,000 kroner; the court documents and later coverage use the more precise figure. Separately, the artist was to receive a fee of around 40,000 kroner for his work, and the contract said the banknotes would go back to the museum when the show closed in January 2022.

Two crates, two blank canvases

When museum staff opened the crates shortly before the exhibition, they found two framed canvases with nothing on them. The accompanying title, Take the Money and Run, made the point plainly: the money was the artwork, and it had left with the artist.

Museum director Lasse Andersson took it with some humour at first. He told the BBC that the stunt had stirred up his curators and himself but had also made him laugh, and Kunsten decided to hang the empty frames in the show anyway. He was equally clear, though, that the cash belonged to the museum and was due back under the contract.

Haaning saw it differently. Speaking to Danish media, he framed the piece as a protest against what he described as poor pay for artists, and urged others in similar situations to follow his lead. He reportedly said that recreating the original works on the museum's terms would have cost him tens of thousands of kroner of his own money. He also insisted that keeping the money was not stealing. "It's not theft. It is a breach of contract," he told Danish radio.

Andersson rejected the claim that Kunsten underpaid him, telling the BBC that the museum had just signed an agreement with the Danish artists' association that raised exhibition fees.

The court case and its outcome

The January deadline passed and the money did not come back, so the museum sued. In a judgment published on 18 September 2023, the Copenhagen City Court ordered Haaning to repay 492,549 kroner. That was the full sum lent, minus 40,000 kroner that the court treated as his artist's and display fee, since the museum had in fact exhibited the blank canvases. He was also ordered to cover the museum's legal costs.

Andersson explained why the museum pursued it: Kunsten is not a rich institution, and the money had come from reserves meant for maintaining its building. Haaning told the broadcaster DR that he was "shocked, but at the same time it is exactly what I have imagined," and said he did not have the money to pay.

The case did not end there. The verdict was appealed, and according to Wikipedia's account of the artwork, the artist and the museum reached an out-of-court settlement in 2024, made possible by a donation from a Danish family foundation. The details have not been widely reported, so treat that last chapter as less firmly documented than the 2023 ruling.

Is it art, or just a broken contract?

That question is the heart of why people still discuss the case. Haaning's own line, quoted on Wikipedia, was that the piece only works as art if he does not return the money. In other words, the act of keeping the cash is the content. Without it, two empty frames are just two empty frames.

This puts Take the Money and Run in a long tradition of conceptual art where the idea matters more than the object. Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal; Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning; Yves Klein filled a gallery with nothing and sold "zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility" for gold. Each forced viewers to ask who decides what counts as art and what it is worth.

The court, however, was not judging the artistic merit. It judged a loan agreement. The two questions can both have clear answers at once: a work can be a sharp, memorable piece of art and still breach a contract. Many commentators made exactly that point, and the court's decision to let Haaning keep his fee because the work was shown suggests the judges saw some value in what he delivered.

What the dispute says about artists' pay

Haaning's protest landed because it touched a real issue. Many artists, especially in contemporary and conceptual practice, earn little from exhibitions even when museums gain visitors and attention from their work. Fee agreements between artists' unions and institutions, like the Danish one Andersson mentioned, exist precisely because of that imbalance.

The irony is that the original commission was about wages: the whole point of the Danish and Austrian income works was to compare what ordinary workers earn. By keeping the money, Haaning turned a museum's illustration of income inequality into a live negotiation over his own pay.

For museums, the case is a cautionary tale about lending real cash for art made of money. For artists, it raised the profile of fair-fee campaigns, though few would recommend testing them in court.

Key facts at a glance

Artist: Jens Haaning, Danish conceptual artist, born 1965.
Museum: Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark; director Lasse Andersson.
Money lent: 532,549 Danish kroner in banknotes, plus a separate artist's fee of about 40,000 kroner.
Work delivered: two blank canvases titled Take the Money and Run (2021), shown in the exhibition Work It Out.
Ruling: Copenhagen City Court, September 2023, ordered repayment of 492,549 kroner plus legal costs.
Afterwards: appealed, then reportedly settled out of court in 2024.