Danish artist Jens Haaning has been ordered to repay the Kunsten Museum in Aalborg 532,000 kroner ($76,000) after handing in two blank canvases as artworks in a project he named ‘Take the Money and Run’.

In 2021, Jens Haaning, a Danish conceptual artist whose work focuses on power and inequality, was commissioned by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg to recreate two of his earlier artworks for which he had used a bunch of banknotes to represent the average income in Denmark and Austria. The artist agreed and the museum provided about 532,000 kroner ($76,000) for him to recreate the art pieces, including a fee of 40,000 kroner. Only when the museum staff unpacked the two artworks from Haaning, they found two blank canvases titled ‘Take the Money and Run’.

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German artist Werner Härtl has carved out a truly unique niche for himself – he is currently the only known artist who uses diluted cow dung to create sepia-style paintings.

Here at Oddity Central, we’ve featured some funky art mediums in the past, from the artist’s own blood as paint, to dead cockroaches as canvases for tiny paintings, but in terms of weirdness, few things come close to Werner Härtl’s chosen medium. The German artist started experimenting with cow dung in 2012, during a stint as an agricultural worker. He packed some manure into a canister and used water to dilute it in order to obtain different sepia tones. These days, he prefers to get the ‘paint’ directly from the source, placing the canister just under the cow’s rectum as it poops. He claims that harvesting just two bovine bowel movements provides him with enough material for at least half a year.

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Elito ‘Amangpintor’ Circa is a Filipino artist who rose to fame for using his own blood to create canvas paintings that have attracted both praise and criticism over the years.

Born in a poor family that couldn’t afford to buy improper art supplies, Elito Circa experimented with a variety of unusual mediums as a child, including plums and tomatoes, but it was when he accidentally scraped his hand that he discovered the art medium that would mark his artistic career – his own blood. He quickly realized that the blood not only made his paintings more durable, as it was harder to erase from the canvas, but that it also made his artworks his own in a way that he had never imagined before.

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At just over 200 square feet in size and a yearly yield of 29 bottles of wine, Via Mari 10 is considered the world’s smallest vineyard.

Located on the rooftop of a 16th-century palazzo in the heart of Reggio Emilia, Via Mari 10 – named after the name and number of the street – is not your average vineyard. Not only is it incredibly small in size, it also has an extremely modest yearly yield of wine. However, the most peculiar thing about the Via Mari 10 wine is that you’re not supposed to drink it. The owner of the vineyard considers the 29 or so bottles of wine produced every year as works of art that should be collected and admired rather than consumed. That’s kind of a problem, considering that you are expected to pay 5,000 euros ($5,000) for a bottle of wine you’re not even supposed to drink.

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A museum in the German city of Wolfsburg recently removed a controversial art installation by English artist Damien Hirst after animal rights group PETA filed a complaint about it killing flies.

Flies are generally seen as annoying pests to be exterminated or at least kept at bay, but a controversial art installation featuring a fly-killing UV light has attracted the wrath of animal rights group PETA and sparked a heated debate about the rights of the flying insects. Titled “A Hundred Years (1990)”, the art installation by award-winning artist and entrepreneur Damien Hirst was recently removed from Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg after PETA filed a complaint claiming that it infringed on Germany’s Animal Welfare Act, which bans the killing or harming of animals without proper reason. Whether flies fall under that law or not is yet to be determined, but the decision has already sparked controversy in Germany.

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Brenda Delgado, a self-taught artist from Manila, in the Philippines, paints dead cockroaches into miniature artworks inspired by classics like Starry Night or Girl With a Pearl Earring.

When it comes to unusual art mediums, it’s tough to find something more bizarre than Brenda Delgado’s choice for a canvas. The 30-year-old resident of Caloocan City in Manila came up with the idea to paint on dead cockroaches while sweeping some dead bugs from her working space. She noticed how shiny and smooth cockroach wings were, paused, and somehow thought about painting on them. She started using oil paints to recreate tiny versions of classic masterpieces like Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, and her works soon started attracting attention online.

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Albert Zakirov, an artist from the Russian Federation’s Tatarstan Autonomous Republic has an original, albeit controversial painting technique – he uses women’s naked bodies as his paintbrushes.

Albert Zakirov started drawing and painting at an early age and spent much of his childhood preparing for art school. After studying with an excellent teacher for a couple of months in tenth grade, he picked up the necessary knowledge to get admitted into art school, where he quietly studied the basics while experimenting with all sorts of unusual techniques and mediums. He never graduated from art school, but it was there that he first used a woman’s body to paint on canvas, and it was this experience that inspired him to make the technique his own.

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‘Uglier and Uglier’, a controversial artwork that ranked photos and videos of 5,000 different real-life women from ugly to ugliest, was removed by a Shanghai-based gallery following public outcry.

Created by male Chinese artist Song Ta, ‘Uglier and Uglier’ featured photos and clips of thousands of women on a university campus ranked by how unattractive he found them. Song reportedly created the controversial exhibit in 2013 and showcased it in several art galleries since, but its latest outing at the OCAT Shanghai gallery was met with so much criticism from the public that it was eventually taken down. The fact that Song Ta once said that he and his assistants ranked the women depicted in his artwork from “forgivably ugly” to “unforgivably ugly” might have had something to do with people’s reaction to the exhibit…

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Ask anyone if they would pay anything to own another’s person’s poop, and they will most likely say “hell, no”. But everything changes when the said poop becomes a work of art. Case in point, “Artist’s Shit”, a collection of 30g tin cans allegedly containing the poop of Italian artist Piero Manzoni. Art collectors are buying them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When Piero Manzoni came up with the idea to can his own poop, in 1961, he probably had no idea that his 30g metal containers would one day sell for astronomical prices. In 2007, the Tate art gallery in London, bought one of Manzoni’s 90 cans for £22,350 ($30,000), and while that may seem like a lot for what is literally just canned crap, they actually got a great deal. In 2007, another can of “Merda d’Artista” was auctioned off in Milan, for a whopping £81,000 ($108,000). Crazy, right? Not really, just another good deal, because Manzoni’s cans of poop are currently worth around $300,000 apiece. Last year, someone bought can no. 54 for £182,500 ($242,000). At this rate, they’ll soon be worth millions.

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Most people let the strands of hair that fall off when their shower just go down the drain, or they throw it in the trash, but Lucy Gafford, a multimedia artist from Alabama, uses it to create detailed works of art right on her bathroom wall.

The self-proclaimed “Shower Hair Master” discovered that her wet hair made a unique, albeit bizarre art medium, three years ago, while showering. She gathered the hair that came off of her head while washing it, and spread it on the bathroom wall, as she usually did. She planned to throw it away after she was done, but this time she noticed that the strands made up a recognizable shape, so she started playing around with the mass of hair and ended up creating a squirrel.

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Meet Mike Wolfe, the man who has not only embraced his bushy back, but also uses it as a means of creative expression. He comes up with quirky designs and gets his old friend Tyler Harding to ‘manscape’ them into his back hair every few months.

Up until a few years ago, Mike, like millions of other men, was embarrassed by the thick overgrowth on his back and felt compelled to get rid of it. In fact, he was actually afraid to admit it to his wife on their first date 16 years ago.

“He said, ‘I have to tell you something,’” recalled Jamie, Mike’s wife. “And I’m kind of getting nervous, my heart’s beating a little bit. He leans over and whispers, ‘I’ve got back hair.’”

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45-year-old Mike Drake has been doing something bizarre in the name of art for over a decade – he’s been collecting all his fingernail clippings, stuffing them in paperweights, and selling them for $300 to $500 apiece!

The Queens resident started the strange practice 11 years ago: “I used to bite my nails, and I wondered how long they could grow,” he told The Huffington Post. “And then I wondered how much I might be able to accumulate.” So he collected his nail clippings in a Ziploc baggie for about a year, and was about to throw them out when inspiration struck. He decided to do something ‘artistic’ with them.

“I realised I went to all that effort, and I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound. I already worked with acrylics as a hobby so I decided to make paperweights.”

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Andy Huot, a mechanical engineer from Louisville, Kentucky, spends his free time looking for recognizable shapes in bags of Cheetos Cheese Curls. Over the past year, he has spent hours opening bag after bag of the high-calorie snack, examining each nugget of puffed corn with the concentration of a museum curator. He takes photographs of all his exciting finds and shares them on Instagram for his 40,000 + followers to see.

It all started last October, when Andy was working on an invention at home. He got hungry, so he simply grabbed a bag of Cheetos and dug right in. Because his ‘creative mind’ was already at work, he began to spot seemingly ‘humanoid’ pieces. Intrigued, he clicked a few photographs with his phone and shared them with his friends and family who found it very funny.

So he set up ‘Cheese Curls of Instagram’, an account where he only posts ‘pictures of Cheetos that resemble things’. Within hours, he began to get hundreds of likes and comments. “I didn’t expect this response,” he admitted. “It motivated me to keep going to try harder.” So he did just that. By the end of last year, he had amassed a huge following with comments like: “this is the most unique and epic page on Instagram”.

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With a population nearing nine billion people and food shortages becoming increasingly problematic, the human race needs sustainable solutions if it wants to survive. Japanese designer Ai Hasegawa has come up with a very controversial approach to solving environmental and food-related issues – the possibility of women giving birth to various animal species and eventually eating them.

In one of her most intriguing projects yet, “I Wanna Deliver a Shark…”, Ai Hasegawa tackles “the problem of human reproduction in an age of over-population and environmental crisis.” She envisions the possibility of humans one day giving birth to their food and satisfying both their nutritional needs and that of giving life. The 33-year-old says having a human baby isn’t as simple as some people think, especially with our world about to face a major food crisis. She argues that bringing new humans into this world is definitely not the answer, but giving birth to endangered animal species might be just what we need to survive. “We are genetically predisposed to raise children as a way of passing on our genes to the next generation but we live in an age where the struggle to raise a child in decent conditions is becoming harder with gross over-population and difficult environmental conditions,” Hasegawa says. “We must also eat, and we are equally facing growing food shortages as a result of over-fishing, land use and a growing population. By giving birth to an edible animal it might place more value on that endangered species and help prevent it’s extinction.”

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Miami-based performance artist Orestes de la Paz has put his heart, soul and fat into 20 bars of special soap made with his liposuctioned blubber. The bars of human soap are available for purchase and priced at $1,000.

Orestes de la Paz underwent a liposuction procedure in December of last year, and decided to turn the removed fat into soap to prevent it from going rancid. He came up with the idea for his  art thesis after realizing that “clients are willing to try anything to feel and look beautiful, even to the extent of buying products with human elements in them (stem cells, placenta, semen; you name it, it’s out there.)” Working as a hairstylist and make-up artist, Orestes loves combining the worlds of art and beauty together, so the unusual project sort of made sense to him. Apart from coconut oil, organic vegetable shortening, lavender and tree tea oils, as well as other cosmetics ingredients, his unique soap bars are 25% human fat, which apparently leaves the user’s hands soft after washing. “There’s always a certain amount of blood, sweat, and tears that goes into any artwork. I just make it more explicit,” the artist said about his bizarre project.

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