Cleaner ruins million dollar artwork
A cleaner in Germany has ruined a piece of modern art worth €800,000 (AUD$1.1m) because she didn’t realise it was art and thought it needed a good clean.
The sculpture had been loaned to the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund by a private collector.
Titled ‘When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling’ it comprised of a rubber trough underneath a wooden tower made from slats. Inside the trough, there was a layer of pain that represented dried rainwater.
However the overzealous cleaner saw the layer of paint in the trough as a challenge and set about cleaning it until it looked new.
The sculpture was a work by German artist Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997. He was widely considered to be one of the most talented artists of his generation.
A spokeswoman from the museum told German media that the cleaner "removed the patina from the four walls of the trough".
"It is now impossible to return it to its original state," she added.
According to The Guardian, the outsourced cleaning crew had been told to stay 20cm from the artworks however it’s unclear if the female cleaner had received the memo.
It’s not the first artwork to be ruined by an overenthusiastic cleaner. In 1986, a cleaner mopped away a ‘grease stain’ in a €400,000 ($530k) Joseph Beuys painting in Dusseldorf.
In 2004, a cleaner at the Tate Britain in London threw away an artwork, mistaking it for rubbish. The work, a plastic bag with discarded paper and cardboard in it, was a part of the ‘Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art’ exhibition. Although it was recovered from the bin, it was too damaged to display so artist Gustav Metzger replaced it with another bag.
