Cleaner "Destroys" Work Of Art - By Cleaning It

Muahahaha! Excellent! This type of 'art' deserves to be destroyed.

what a visionary!

WWDCD? (What would DuChamps do?) He didn't destroy the work or art. He just changed it. The minumum wage earning janitor without the high-faluting concepts and degrees of the artist became a part of the creative process.

Anyone else remember Murphy Brown?

Deconstruction is an art too.

It was a piece of crap, anyway.

So a cleaner works in an art museum. Supposedly they wouldn't actually clean works of art, even the crappy-looking ones. You don't see cleaners going around the museum vacuuming the paintings. So what would prompt this cleaner to do anything more than dust any piece of sculpture, let alone change the entire surface of any piece, without even asking anyone first?

I call shenanigans. Museum's trying to garner a little publicity, maybe collect on some insurance money because they spent a ton of money on something that's very similar to what's sitting in my back yard right now.

It was just on loan to the museum, they didn't own it, so it's unlikely they were the ones setting up an insurance scam.

The title of this article should be read "Cleaner Destroys 'Work Of Art' - By Cleaning It".

The price of this "artwork" is hilarious and ridiculous at the same time, and goes to show that the "Emperors new clothes"- syndrome is alive and kicking!

£690,000...

Really?

Screw Wall Street and big corporations, who the hell sells a piece of crap like this for that much money?

I'm done with work, I'm becoming an artist...

I'm surprised the cleaner didn't throw it in the trash.

I don't really understand or like this artwork either, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be a legitamate valuable work that has been ruined. A bunch of dummies getting off on dissing on art they know nothing about. "my kid could make that" syndrome, sheesh!

To everyone here who says "this is not art, this is crap", I have to ask you, are you art experts of any sorts?

Just because you don't know much about art and don't like this piece, does not mean its crap. Well, perhaps in your eyes its crap, but obviously not in the eyes of people who do understand art, and value it at £690,000.

You can put lipstick and earrings on a pig, but it's still just a dirty old sow.

That is just the reason why I call shenanigans on this. Every so often, you hear a story about some person "who didn't know" damaging or cleaning some so-called work of art, and destroying it because they didn't recognize it as such.

It seems to me like sensationalism to get attention for a particular institution or artist, or someone taking a jab at the inscrutable world of modern art.

It's designed to provoke typical responses like: "my kid coulda made that", with the usual "are you an art critic" reply, that just shows the flaws in both sides of the issue: first the unwillingness to accept new things, second the ivory tower snobbishness that nobody but art experts can truly understand art.

And that's why I think it's been staged.

modern art is shit

Obviously none of you have ever lived in Germany! Honestly, they can be quite excessive about cleanliness and cleaners, and their cleaners are thus by necessity zealous. It's not unusual for the cleaners to be foreigners from underdeveloped countries who speak little German (or anything other than their own language) but are great cleaners, and if they've been told to clean everything... well, they will. In 1986, rather famously, an artwork by Joseph Beuys, a dirty bathtub, was also cleaned by a museum cleaner.