Rubbish Mistaken for Art

The New Observer
October 31, 2015

Cleaners who recently threw away yet another “modern art” exhibit in Italy after “mistaking” it for trash have once again revealed the truth of the Hans Christian Andersen fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes—that “modern art” is actually rubbish, and the establishment is just too stupid, stuck-up, or deliberately blind to see it as such.

The latest incident took place at Italy’s Museion Bozen-Bolzano museum, where its owners have now formally apologized to “contemporary” art duo Goldschmied & Chiari after their latest “artwork” was thrown away by cleaners who thought that it was trash.

The “art,” called “Where shall we go dancing tonight?” featured cigarette butts, 300 empty champagne bottles, and confetti. It was allegedly designed to depict “1980s hedonism.”

But the true nature of the rubbish was exposed when, after an event at the museum, cleaning staff assumed that the trash was just leftover mess after a wild party in the building.

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Above: the Goldschmied and Chiari “art” before the cleaners arrived, and below, afterwards.

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Museum curator Letizia Ragaglia told the local Alto Adige newspaper: “On Friday night there was an event at the museum. We told the staff just to clean up the foyer and to leave everything else alone.

“Evidently they thought that this area was part of the foyer.” She added: “Of course we tell staff not to clean away art.”

“This is not the first such case in contemporary art,” Ms Ragalia added. “This shows how much interest, but also how much irritation contemporary art can cause.”

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In June 2015, a wood and tile sculpture by New York-based artist Jim Osman, valued at $10,000, was removed from a public art show in Madison, Connecticut, by a local maintenance worker, who tore it apart and threw it in the garbage.

The worker, who remains anonymous, believed the sculpture was trash left behind by local skateboarders and used a hammer to dismantle the structure.

“He didn’t think it was art,” foundation president William Bendig told the Associated Press. “All he had to do was call us and we would have moved it.”

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In February 2012, a cleaner threw “contemporary artworks” made out of newspaper, cardboard, and cookie pieces scattered across the floor. The alleged “art” was part of the Sala Murat “modern art” gallery in Bari, southern Italy.

A spokesman from the cleaning firm who employed the cleaning lady said the unnamed worker was “just doing her job”. He added his firm’s insurance would cover the value of the art, estimated to be around €10,000.

According to local press at the time, security staff noticed a number of items were missing when the venue, in the province of Bari, opened.

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It later emerged the cleaner had handed them over to refuse collectors, thinking it was rubbish left behind by workers who set up the “Mediating Landscape” exhibition. The cleaning lady saw stacked empty containers and called the refuse removal company to take away what she described as “simple cardboard packaging” she had found “in a corner of the room.”

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In 2001, a pile of beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and coffee cups, supposedly set up as “art” by “artist”  Damien Hirst at London’s Eyestorm Gallery was cleared away as trash by a cleaner.

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In 2004, a bag of paper and cardboard by “artist” Gustav Metzger was thrown out as trash by a cleaner while it was on “display” at the Tate Museum in London.

* It will not have gone unnoticed by observant readers that the vast majority of “modern art” and “modern artists” are Jews, as can be seen by a perusal of famous author Tom Wolfe’s book on modern art, The Painted Word (Bantam;  1999), and his follow-up book on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House (Bantam;  1999).

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In October 2014, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, ran an exhibition titled “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism” in which they showed that “American Modernism” is completely Jewish in origin. (The Daily Beast,How Jews Created American Modernism,” 08.01.14 )

In this light, one can only consider the comment made by Adolf Hitler in 1933 on “degenerate art” and its meaning for civilization:

“The fact that something has never existed before is no proof for the quality of an accomplishment; it can just as easily be evidence for an inferiority which has never existed prior thereto.

“Thus if a so-called artist perceives his sole purpose in life as presenting the most confusing and incomprehensible portrayals of the accomplishments of the past or the present, the actual accomplishments of the past will nevertheless remain accomplishments, while the artistic stammerings of the painting, music, sculpture, and architecture produced by these types of charlatans will one day be nothing but proof of the magnitude of a nation’s downfall.”—Opening Address to the NSDAP Party Day Rally, Nuremberg, September 1, 1933.

See also: Degenerate Art: The Exhibition Guide in German and English—the original guide to the famous 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Germany, in full German original and English translation.