Nothing will be remembered, in the art world! The sweat of an art handler. The red eyes of a biennale electrician. The whimper of an art volunteer. Nothing will be remembered.

Thanklessness is a method in the art world.

You may hear an artist-curator thanking the Danish Arts Foundation. Have you ever listened to an artist-curator thanking an electrician? You may be thinking, Oh! Don’t be dramatic! Who thanks the electricians? Feature films usually list the entire crew, including the electricians, in the end credits. The art world has stolen many things from the world of feature films. Thankfulness is not one of them.

Thanklessness can take on various forms. Poetic thanklessness is one of its kind.

Poetic thanklessness as a phrase doesn’t mean that the thanklessness is in some poetic dimension. It simply means that a private gallery artist did not thank a poet.

Stealing is Conceptual Art

No one has ever said that stealing is conceptual art. Not even Sol LeWitt. But is conceptual art stealing? Sol LeWitt has not said that either, in Sentences on Conceptual Art.

In a 2012 Malayalam mockumentary called Mallu Art Controversy, a character played by political theorist Dr. Sreejesh NP says that “Stealing is not conceptual art as John claims. To steal art from a poor artist like Sudeep Damodaran, in this time and space, it is not art, it is theft.”

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But political theorists may not understand how contemporary art changes its colours.

Once, a Danish museum handed over half a million kroner (money) to Jens Haaning, possibly thinking that he is a reputed contemporary artist who has participated in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta XI etc. The artist is known for framing actual cash, like the US Dollar, as artworks. Maybe, the Danish people thought that their cash would also be glorified as art through this act of framing. Instead of framing kroner, for the exhibition, the artist sent blank canvases called Take the Money and Run. The artist also sent a conceptual email, explaining the act of stealing the museum money as art. The blank canvases were exhibited along with the email. After the exhibition, the artist demanded the blank canvases back. The museum asked the artist to return the stolen money. The museum went to court. Maybe the judiciary does not understand contemporary art. The court asked the artist to pay back the museum. Later, the artist made a settlement with the museum, and the work called Take the Money and Run is now part of the museum collection. The museum says that Jens Haaning is an important Danish artist.

This case is important in our context of poetic thanklessness.

The title of the work, Take the Money and Run, is stolen from the name of a 1969 feature film by Woody Allen. We don’t know if Woody Allen is feeling defanged and gutted. In the art world, there is a word called “homonymous” to explain the lifting of titles and ideas. There are related words, like intertextuality, appropriation, transcoding, citation, reiteration, pastiche, transposing, simulacrum, restaging, metafiction, reframing, translocating, reimagining, hypertextuality, palimpsest, parody, polyphony, remix, imitation, mimesis, and if nothing works, rhizome.

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Lack of imagination is celebrated in the art world.

Indeterminacy

The meaning of the word indeterminacy is “vague”. In the art world, indeterminacy is used to refer to its own moral ambiguity. The art world thinks that it critiques power, while it rubs shoulders with power. Tirdad Zolghadr calls it the indeterminacy in the moral economy of contemporary art, caused by its disidentification with power.

In other words, the art world is duplicitous.

Dubious.

The dubiousness of the art world includes the commodification of activism, the packaging of protest, purloined in velvet.

Velvet is not a great art material. It fades over time. A private gallery writer may glorify this natural phenomenon by calling it Oxidative Photodegradation. Basically, velvet will turn dull. What looked like red, twenty years ago, will start to look like shades of orange now. Velvet is an art collector’s nightmare. Over time, it loses its radiant appearance. Radical appearance will inevitably vanish.

Poetry as Contemporary Art

Radical art is often provocative. It provokes the left wing. Christoph Schlingensief’s Ausländer Raus! (Foreigners Out) caused an uproar and angered the progressive people, the left wing. It led to public anger and discourse, due to the seemingly unethical behaviour by the artist, the protagonist of the artwork. What is aesthetic about the provocation is the discourse itself. The energy of the discourse is the aesthetic force of the artwork.

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Recently, in Indian art, there has been a discourse on plagiarism, ethics, “calculated deflections” and “self-congratulatory performances of radicalism”, in which a private gallery artist is accused of stealing the lines of a poem by Aamir Aziz. A discourse in which an art theorist like Santosh Sadanandan has presented his argument in a style of inimitable striking syntax, in solidarity with the poet. Here, the difference is that the protagonist, the poet, is provoked by the unethical behaviour of an artist. What provokes the poet is political, not personal. The discourse is political.

The discourse is about the poem.

This is an instance of poetry as contemporary art.

Looking at the power of poetry as an art form, I am tempted to write a poem. Here we go:

Biennale Electrician

– John Xaviers Arackal

Nothing will be remembered,
Red eyes of a biennale electrician,
Sweat of an art handler,
Whimper of an art volunteer.

Nothing will be remembered,
Belittlement of an art clerk,
Being asked, “Where is my Butterfly Mixie?”
In front of the Board of Trustees.

Nothing will be remembered,
A Mattancherry Sunni art handler,
Screamed at, in front of art mediators,
For opening the wrong crates,
Shipped by a confused political painter.

Nothing will be remembered,
A Gothuruth Nasrani art handler,
Asked to babysit a Dash,
Forced to hitchhike from the airport.
Nearest stationery shop, 12 km away,
To buy a green refill; To forge a veterinarian,
To air cargo, the curator’s pet.

Nothing will be remembered,
A biennale electrician screamed at.
Physical impossibility to be,
At five places at the same time.
Impossibilities of an Alienated Life.

Nothing will be remembered,
In low voltage, in low amperage.

Nothing will be remembered,
Red eyes of a biennale electrician,
Sweat of an art handler,
Whimper of an art volunteer.

—

I don’t know if this is a poem or not. But it is a set of words. No artist may steal it.

References

Albrethsen, Pernille. “Follow the Money.” Kunstkritikk (blog), October 8, 2021. https://kunstkritikk.com/follow-the-money-2.

———. “Jens Haaning Reaches Settlement with Danish Museum.” Kunstkritikk (blog), May 16, 2024. https://kunstkritikk.com/jens-haaning-reaches-settlement-with-danish-museum.

Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (October 2004): 51–79. https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287042379810.

———. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New edition. London ; New York: Verso, 2022.

Draxler, Helmut. Calling into Question Yesterday’s Position – springerin | Hefte für Gegenwartskunst. Interview by Georg Schöllhammer, 2008. https://springerin.at/en/2008/1/die-position-von-gestern-in-frage-stellen/.

Joselit, David. After Art. Point. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Krishnan, Aishwarya. “Poet Aamir Aziz Accuses Artist Of Plagiarising His Protest Poem ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega.’” TimelineDaily. Accessed April 25, 2025. https://timelinedaily.com/india/poet-aamir-aziz-accuses-artist-of-plagiarising-his-protest-poem-sab-yaad-rakha-jayega.

Luis, Sandip K. “Aamir Aziz-Anita Dube Controversy Is Not about Legality or Copyright | The Indian Express.” Accessed April 25, 2025. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/amir-aziz-anita-dube-controversy-not-about-legality-copyright-9960704/.

Malik, Suhail, and Andrea Phillips. “The Wrong of Contemporary Art: Aesthetics and Political Indeterminacy.” In Reading Rancière, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472547378.

Sadanandan, Santosh. “How Not to Do Things with Words – Santhosh Sadanandan | Facebook,” April 23, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10237594935352434&id=1224607934&_rdr.

Tracy, Marc. “‘Take the Money and Run’ Artist Must Repay Danish Museum.” The New York Times, September 19, 2023, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/arts/design/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and-run.html.

Zolghadr, Tirdad. Traction: An Applied and Polemical Attempt to Locate Contemporary Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.

(A Novel Way is a series by John Xaviers Arackal which is about reading contemporary life through books, especially novels. John Xaviers Arackal is an arts professional who is serving as a Programme Officer of the Arts Practice programme at the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore.)