Culture

From H.C. Andersen to “Fucking Insane”

The Danish language is not merely evolving – it is also losing its vocabulary. There was a time when language revealed who you were. Not how much money you had, but whether you had taken the trouble to think, to read, and to choose your words with care.

From Oslo’s arcades to the muzzles of power

When the fountain sculpture Pomona was erected at Skillebekk in Oslo in October 1877, it triggered an immediate and vehement emotional immune response in Morgenbladet. The newspaper’s writers deployed all their academic and rhetorical capital in a furious denunciation of what they called “municipal artistic taste.”

The paintings of the Nerdrum Museum are a hegemonic revolt

The Nerdrum Museum, with its tradition-based aesthetic and artistic standards, represents a radical break with dogmatic and hegemonic modernism, establishing Odd Nerdrum as an institutionally recognised figurative artist. The most striking feature of his work is its focus on universal human conditions, reinforced by a painterly development of form that endows the images with a visual richness of exceptional quality.

An artistically worthless memorial monument

Matias Faldbakken’s memorial monument to the Utøya tragedy is an oversized steelwork construction devoid of any reference to the dead and the bereaved. The theme of remembrance is displaced by the steel rig’s dominant beams, as though the structure itself were of greater importance. It is both a political and an aesthetic catastrophe.

The voice from Kherson: Why artificial intelligence makes Svitlana Tarabarova the defining pop poet of our time

Svitlana Tarabarova (Wikimedia Commons) In 1909, the revolutionary postmaster Adam Egede-Nissen stood in a church in Vardø with a christening bundle in his arms. He was a man who knew both Lenin and Leon Trotsky personally, and who was monitored by Norwegian counter-intelligence for decades. Trotsky had grown up on the steppes of the Kherson […]

The Two Christinas — and so much more

Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889). Oil on canvas, 153 × 90 cm, Gripsholm Castle, Sweden. Portrait of Christina Nilsson (1843–1921) in the role of Ophelia in Ambroise Thomas’ opera Hamlet from 1868. When the curtain rises in a modern opera house, the audience beholds a world of velvet, gold and sublime beauty. They hear voices that defy […]

Lars von Trier’s beautiful nightmare

Lars von Trier’s Europa trilogy depicts a continent in total decay, yet it is some of the most beautiful cinema ever filmed. The beauty is the very point, and that is why it is so disturbing. Art works far more powerfully than analyses. Analysis explains, but art makes the threat present, emotional and almost physical.

A cat man’s confession

Perhaps the dog is man’s best friend. It is an established truth, repeated so often that it has become an axiom. But for me, and for many others who share my quiet fellowship, the truth is different. My best friend is the cat’s. In a society that often celebrates the outgoing, the obedient and the […]

Lars von Trier’s Europe trilogy is a prophetic image of its time

Lars von Trier’s masterful Europe trilogy was at the time (1984–1991) perceived as a sombre but detached artistic play with a continent in ruins after the war. Today it seems prophetic. Great artists are a kind of seismographs who can sense tremors deep down in the subsurface, which ordinary people are unable to perceive.

Myths and facts about the Vikings: From spectacle to the bedrock of civilisation

A peculiar and emotionally charged tug-of-war over our own history is unfolding in the public sphere. On one side stands a modern entertainment industry churning out series such as Vikings, reducing the Norse era to a glossy action spectacle filled with intricate skaldic poetry, formidable shipbuilding technology, and stylised violence. On the other stands an academic elite and moral arbiters who can scarcely wait to reduce the entire period to a Scandinavian equivalent of ISIS or Hamas.