Nybrud - dansk kunst i 1990erne by Rune Gade and Camilla Jalving

Rating 6 out of 10.
This book has been an interesting read for me. It quite extensively recounts the happenings on the Danish art scence in the 1990's up until the middle of the 0's in our century. So modern art... Well I must admit that I am a little critical, I mean to a large extent modern art of today is still running in the same groove as was established by modernism almost 100 years ago! I mean it was cool when Marcel Duchamp submitted his urinal to an exibit in 1917 or gave Mona Lisa a mustache, but how cool is it when lesser artists copycat such acts today? Not particular cool! Not that much rock'n'roll! These Danish guys are all on the payroll from the government and they just want their work accepted at the next museum. Duchamp knew that was an impossibility for him to make any money on his art so he (The Jesus Christ in modern art) made his money as a language teacher! I mean nobody supported the modernists, no government grants to them, and they made history! Anyway it seems like painting has come back in Danish art and there are some good ones, I especially like a painting by Kathrine Ærtebjerg called "Forestilling, forvandling", it's a kind of fairy-gnome like painting which is nice. Also it was interesting to see some works by Jes Brinch and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen called "Burn Out", on a main square in Copenhagen the simply turned a bus and 18 cars arround and smashed them up, and in a museum they made the scene of a burnt down kinder garden. These work were made in 1994, but it's quite amazing that it exactly looks like a scene we often see all over Europe today, young immigrants of moslem descendance putting fire to everything, cars, buses, schools, kinder gardens, vandalism at large. It's almost like the artists back in 1994 had a presentiment of what was coming. Anyway for anybody who wanna know what has happened on the Danish art scene recently this is a good book.