It’s Not Easy Being Clean

Pictured above, via Artnet, is the aftermath of a party. The banner from the event has fallen to the floor. The ground is litered with confetti, cigarettes, and other party regalia. The partygoers apparently had a lot to drink — there are dozens of empty champagne bottles in the image above, and had you vsited the room at the time the picture was taken, you would have found a total of about 300. If that’s your scene, it looks like a good time was had by all.

The next day, the same room looked like this.

All clean!

And that was a problem.

On October 23, 2015, Museion, the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolanzo, Italy, hosted a party. They were celebrating the opening of Goldschmeid and Chiari, an artist duo from Milan. And when the janitorial crew arrived after the party, they did what janitorial crews do: they cleaned up the mess. Unfortuantely, the “mess” they cleaned wasn’t a mess at all — it was the art being celebrated. As Complex explains: “The installation by Milanese artists Goldschmied and Chiari called, ‘Where are we going to dance tonight?,’ was the recreation of a party scene that included empty champagne bottles and confetti scattered on the floor. The work was intended to reflect the lavish lifestyle of Italian political class in the 1980s and was only visible after the museum had closed.” But the janitors didn’t know that.

The mistake was a failure of communication. Per Artnet, “the museum’s director, Letizia Ragaglia, told Italian newspaper Alto Adige that the cleaning staff had been warned not to disturb the artwork. ‘We told them just to clean the foyer because that’s where the event on Friday night had been. Evidently, they mistook the installation for the foyer,’ she lamented.” The museum owned up to the error quickly; as Complex explained, “the museum shared images on its Facebook of the now empty space with a single black trash bag,” as seen in the second image above, and apologized for the mistake.

But there was some good news. While Goldschmeid and Chiari’s party was supposed to evoke feelings of the politics of the 1980s, it took place in the realities of the 2010s, and there was a significant policy change that occurred during the intervening decades. Italy, like many parts of the world, instituted recycling laws. The janitorial crew that “cleaned up” the artist’s fake party didn’t just throw everything away — they separated out the bottles and paper and kept them aside. The museum was able to salvage much of the work and restore it.

Bonus fact: A few months before the clean up described above, a 12-year-old boy was visiting an art museum in Taipei with a group of other students. Unfortuantely for this 12-year-old, though, this field trip was heavy on the “trip.” While walking by a piece by Italian painter Paolo Porpora, the boy lost his footing, as seen in this video, and broke his fall by leaning into the painting. As Artnet reported, “Porpora’s Flowers got a fist-sized hole as result of the impact.” The painting was valued at $1.5 million before the accident, but, per Artnet, the boy wasn’t expected to pony up anything due to the accident: “Andrea Rossi, curator of the exhibition, has declared that they won’t ask the family of the boy to pay for the restoration and that the painting is insured (phew).”

From the Archives: When Jesus Turned into a Potato (Accidentally): Emphasis on “accidentally” (and maybe “potato”).