Spiders are artists: Amsterdam museum will not remove spider webs

The well-known Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is respecting spiders in the museum like artists by allowing them to create their webs which the cleaning staff will not remove, The Guardian reported.

The idea took hold after an Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno who is based in Berlin asked the museum authorities to treasure the spider webs wherever they emerge, according to Julia Kantelberg, assistant curator.

Kantelberg says that afterwards webs are being respected as pieces of art like The Night Watch by Rembrandt or The Milkmaid by Vermeer( two of the masterpieces on display at the museum).

The artist Saraceno, according to the curator, wanted the museum authorities to broaden their perspective thus challenging them to acknowledge the fact that spider webs are cohabiting in the museum.

Ever since this idea came up, curator Julia Kantelberg started looking around the building with a different attitude. She walks around to spot where webs started to appear, treating them not as a nuisance anymore.

Three months before the exhibition opens, cleaners were asked not to remove spiders and their webs, she was quoted as saying.

In the middle ages, lizards, insects and spiders were associated with death and the devil in European culture, it is suggested, but the exhibition notes that in the 16th and 17th centuries there was a reimagining after the microscope allowed artists and scientists to appreciate a beauty that had not been always obvious, the report said.

When the exhibition starts on 30 September, the spiders and webs on the wall will offer people an opportunity to reconsider their feeling about bugs of all kinds, according to the report.

The exhibition will offer viewers enter a room in the Middle Ages, before going to early modern period where the new world opens up, thanks to the invention of microscope that helped understand the world small animals.