Art

Today we spent most of the day at the Louisiana Museum (Karl's looking at a massive Henry Moore in this photo), which has nothing to do with the hurricane and oil spilled state of the same name. It"s about half an hour North of Copenhagen and the first owner of the property named the place after his three wives who were all named Louise. The core of the museum is an old villa that is now annexed by a few very modern wings, all above the Oeresund, the strait that seperates Denmark from Sweden. It is truly one of the greatest places on earth (actually featured in Patricia Schultz's "1000 places to see before you die") and was actually the trigger to make us wanna come to these Northern shores of Europe (I had attended a weekend symposium at the Louisiana during the Copenhagen Climate Conference last year). For New Yorkers - it's like a mix of the DIA Beacon, Storm King and a Richard Neutra case study house all right on the Great Gatsby part of the Long Island Sound.



With a little help of Danish pastry after our museum cafeteria lunch, Karl got all excited and took the sculpture garden in sprints. There was even a mid-day performance of Modern Scandinavian Jazz featuring a bass clarinet and a trumpet in an improvisational dialogue with taped voices of extinct birds, i.e. some pretentious pseudo-spiritual bull with lots of pompous gesturing towards the sky and the sea by the musicians, which of course makes you pause and wonder, if Modern Art isn"t pretentious, pompous bull to begin with. Luckily a surprisingly wonderful and well exectued exhibition juxtaposing Munch and Warhol and the fabulous collection of the museum blew our cynicism right into the waters of aforementioned Oeresund.



Karl's favorites were Tinguely (of course, since you can push buttons and stuff starts to move very noisyly), Dan Flavin (pictured) and the trippy installation of Yayoi Kusama, an artist he already knew from her installation at the Haus der Kunst. He did like the room full of mirrors with the changing lights today even better than her hall full of pink balloons. Definitely a name to rememeber if you want to excite toddlers and kids about art.