A Dutch museum has recovered an artwork that looks like two empty beer cans after a staff member accidentally threw it in the rubbish bin thinking it was trash.
The work, entitled All The Good Times We Spent Together by French artist Alexandre Lavet, appears on first glance to be two discarded and dented beer tins.
However, a closer look shows they are in fact meticulously hand-painted with acrylics and “required a lot of time and effort to create”, according to the museum.
But their artistic value was lost on a mechanic, who saw them displayed in a lift and chucked them in the bin.
Froukje Budding, a spokesperson for the LAM museum in Lisse, western Netherlands, told AFP that artworks are often left in unusual places – hence the display in a lift.
“We try to surprise the visitor all the time,” she said.
Curator Elisah van den Bergh returned from a short break and noticed that the cans had vanished.
She recovered them from a bin bag just in the nick of time as they were about to be thrown out.
“We have now put the work in a more traditional place on a plinth so it can rest after its adventure,” Budding said.
She stressed there were “no hard feelings” towards the mechanic, who had just started at the museum. “He was just doing his job,” she said.
Sietske van Zanten, the museum’s director, said: “Our art encourages visitors to see everyday objects in a new light.”
“By displaying artworks in unexpected places, we amplify this experience and keep visitors on their toes,” added Van Zanten.
“With this in mind, the cans are unlikely to stay on their traditional plinth for long, said Budding. “We need to think hard about a careful place to put them next,” she said.
The incident is the latest in a long line of unfortunate things to happen to artworks in galleries and museums. In 2023 a man who said he was hungry ate a banana that had been taped to a wall as part of an installation by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan at a gallery in Seoul.
In 2011 an overzealous cleaner in Germany ruined a piece of modern art worth £690,000 after mistaking it for an eyesore that needed a good scrub.
The sculpture by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, widely regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation until his death in 1997, had been on loan to the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund when it fell prey to the cleaner’s scouring pad.
