Tuesday, November 13, 2001

Nerdrum lovpriser Schau
Kristopher Schau has been eating junk food, sleeping badly and refusing to take a shower for a week, doing this in a window in one of the larger stores in Oslo. It's an experiment, or just a crazy stunt, which he named "forfall" or "decay". Schau is known from radio programs where he has been drinking delicacies like pizza, mayonnaise and cola mixed in a blender, and this is right up there with raw-fish-and-icecream-shakes.

The fun part is that serious artists who are more or less self-proclaimed guru's of the Norwegian "avant garde" have been asked to comment on this, and Knut Nerdrum says that this is great art. According to Nerdrum the criteria for good art is that the artist should not think a single complete thought, he should approach the task with irony and he should have no skills connected to the craft.

This sounds like the Norwegian ideal of the romantic artist, and in the name of outdated postmodern irony, I agree with Nerdrum. Oh, he happens to be a very classically educated painter - he has the skills of the craft. I guess he can never be an artist, right?

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