Klara.be is a brand new website about art and culture. To help them get noticed, we set up an experiment to answer the following question: Would anyone notice a valuable work of art when it were not displayed in an art gallery or a museum?

We asked artist Luc Tuymans to help us. He is Belgium’s most famous painter and probably one the most important painters alive. His works are shown in museums all over the world such as the MOMA in New York. His paintings trade at very high prices. (One of his paintings was sold at Christies for 1.4 million US dollars.) THE EXPERIMENTLuc Tuymans secretly painted on a wall in a city center. For 48 hours, hidden cameras recorded the reactions of the passers by. Would they notice this valuable painting? Does our society have an eye for art?

The result was astonishing. Less than 4 percent of the people caught on camera looked at the painting. We put the experiment on the Internet and it was immediately picked up. The buzz lead people to the new site Klara.be, which, as a result, instantly became a leading name in art and culture. A Belgian television station even showed a documentary in prime time about it. The message was clear: our society needs to be more aware of art and that is exactly what Klara.be wants to stimulate.

We used art both as a medium and as a message. By presenting this valuable painting on an ordinary street wall, art became the talk of the town.