CIRCA Art Magazine
Ireland's leading magazine for contemporary visual arts and culture

Tuesday, 7 September 2004

Murder mystery: bad news or art sham?

compiled by Isobel Harbison

Jan De Groot, Paradise Lost. And so are we.

It is hardly unusual for the editor at CIRCA to receive art-news alerts and press releases via e-mail, therefore when we received one from the director of the Detroit Museum of New Art telling us of the tragic death of the young artist Jan de Groot (touted to be exhibiting in the upcoming Piss-Off exhibition with the likes of Sarah Lucas and Sam Taylor-Wood), we believed them, and in a slightly shallow way, mourned his loss. Well, it would have been vulgar not to. The details were mildly gruesome

Without warning, Dutch artist Jan de Groot, 37, has jumped from his parents apartment and is crushed on the sidewalk below. Later, his parents were discovered beheaded in their beds. Their heads seem to have disappeared completely... Jane Speaks, organizing curator for the Detroit Museum of New Art let her public relations department issue a brief epithet: It may be said that Jan de Groot lived his art to the end.

Bizarre, bizarre, bizarre. So I googled this unfortunate man, subject to the whim of his artistic temperament to the very end. However, with the exception of the artist's c.v. (click here), and some images of his work (here), both linked to the Museum's website, there were absolutely no other sites offering his profile. The c.v. may well be false; there seems to be no record of the man in the museums in which he supposedly exhibited. And the MONA website itself is littered with anarchic manifestos boasting hoax exhibitions, as well as a 1996 obituary for the one and only (presumably) Jane Speaks. This must be a truly modern establishment.

Art mysteries are common as muck these days and to be honest they aren't my cup of tea. So I will open this issue to the floor. Readers: have I wasted three hours of my precious life that I will never regain, or is he dead and if so should I apologise? Did Jan de Groot ever exist, and if not then who bothered fabricating his art? Is the Detroit Museum of New Art a fake institution? Has anybody ever been there, or does it merely exist in the heads of several American art anarchists? And if so, that's a lovely idea folks, really it's so avant-garde, but just so irritating. I am going to home to relax with a cup of Earl Grey in front of a reproduction of Vettriano.