Museum Workers Have Rescued an Artwork From the Trash After a Mechanic Mistook It for Garbage

A curator at a Dutch art museum recently found herself rummaging through the trash, looking for two dented beer cans. With great relief, she found them intact. They were then cleaned—and put back on display.

The painted cans were actually handcrafted artworks, which an elevator technician had innocently thrown away after mistaking them for garbage at the LAM museum in Lisse. The museum has a large collection of art depicting food, and it’s known for displaying its works not only on walls and plinths, but in unconventional locations.

“We try to surprise the visitor all the time,” Froukje Budding, a spokesperson for the museum, tells Agence France-Presse (AFP).

French artist Alexandre Lavet’s acrylic and aluminum two-can piece, titled All the Good Times We Spent Together (2016), was exhibited inside the museum’s glass elevator shaft—meant to appear as if it had been left behind by construction workers.

“[The technician] was just doing his job in good faith,” says museum director Sietske van Zanten in a statement. “In a way, it’s a testament to the effectiveness of Alexandre Lavet’s art.”

All the Good Times We Spent Together is a painted recreation of two Jupiler beer cans, complete with the Belgian beer company’s bull logo. This design matches the product’s packaging between 2013 and 2016, when Lavet lived in Brussels. As he writes on his website, the piece is a tribute to the Belgian capital’s “streets, artists’ studios, friends’ flats, parties, exhibition openings at galleries and artist-run spaces, and to this common and familiar object [that] brings people and friends together.”

Evenings spent drinking beer “ultimately embody precious moments of connection,” writes the museum, and they certainly fit with the theme of the LAM museum’s collection, which is food and consumption.

“Our art encourages visitors to see everyday objects in a new light,” van Zanten adds. “By displaying artworks in unexpected places, we amplify this experience and keep visitors on their toes.”

The beer cans are not the first piece of modern art to be thrown away or damaged while on display. Last year, a “hungry” student in South Korea ate a banana that was part of a work by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. In 2011, an industrious cleaner scrubbed the patina off a $1 million sculpture by Martin Kippenberger in Germany. Cleaners also tossed a Damien Hirst installation made up of candy wrappers, newspapers and—notably—empty beer bottles that had been on view at London’s Eyestorm Gallery in 2001.

Hirst found the incident “hysterically funny,” Heidi Reitmaier, the gallery’s head of special projects, told the New York Times’ Warren Hoge in 2001. “Since his art is all about the relationship between art and the everyday, he laughed harder than anyone else.”

At the LAM museum, when curator Elisah van den Bergh discovered that All the Good Times We Spent Together was missing, she conducted a thorough search before finding the piece in a garbage bag ready for the dumpster.

The painted cans are now being displayed temporarily on a traditional plinth at the museum’s entrance. Officials haven’t revealed where they may move to next.

“The cans are unlikely to stay on their traditional plinth for long,” Budding tells AFP. “We need to think hard about a careful place to put them next.”