Conceptual art

It's like an epidemic; fashion, trends, art. Many of us follow what we claim to be 'the normal thing to do'. But just like I refuse to wear harem pants and buy an Iphone because it's fashion, I find it hard to accept the elements of "conceptual art" as art.
I am not the person to judge what is claimed to be art or how art should be evaluated, but art to me represents beauty and the admiration for the given effort and time, as well as the artists' sharing of deep thought or a story that lies beneath.

In conceptual art, the idea and concept is the main focus. The worshippers of conceptual art are impressed by the simplicity and creativity that requires no Picasso skills. In that sense, we can all be artists. But does all art deserve to hang on our walls? Shouldn't we be a little critical?

In a section for modern art, stains of coffee cups are being framed and admired as art whilst I stumble upon blocks of concrete, amazed to find a lable beside it with a name on. There seems to be a form of self-deception and pretensiousness where many stand in front of a conceptual art piece and admire it because it is the expected. We stand in front of a black and white TV screen for hours, looking at a man move his foot from side to side. But hey, if this museum is showing it, it must be something, right?
It's a situation where it's not just the emperor that has no clothes, but everyone.

While examining 4 calender sheets, glued together and framed, 2 floors above a museum attendant is pointing at a Monet painting and explaining why he used 7 years to complete a painting, layer by layer.

E.Y

Fiction of friction.

I was rushing towards the building where I was going to meet the folks in my department for the first time when I noticed a pair of eyes looking at me and walking towards the same direction. She had half-long,dark-blonde hair and was wearing a leather jacket and a green scarf around her neck.The typical "Grunerløkka" fashion of the day. It was a cold and sudden look that knowing my bad luck, made me wonder if this girl and I would end up in the same meeting. Indeed we did.

Pretending that we hadn't exchanged cold (war)winds earlier, we greeted and sat down for our first meeting. Everyone started to presented themselves one by one.When it was her turn, she spoke in a quiet but fast manner with a lot of hand gestures that she was fully aware of. It seemed like she wanted to be comprehended a little intellectual and neurotic. She had a lot of ideas and would raise her voice slightly when someone else would try to cut through the conversation. Trying to avoid the bad karma from earlier, I was being nice and asking her questions. You know, trying to conversate. She never laughed and almost never smiled and whenever she talked to me, she would look over my head and avoid eye contact. I was terrified to be left alone with her.

We sat there for an hour when she stood up and said she had to go. I put on a fake smile and said "See you next week". We were quiet for a few seconds when one of the guys turned towards me and said "Isn't she a great girl?" I was questioningly looking for sarcasm in his face but was disappointed and replied "Yes...yes."

E.Y

Museum feeling

Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo


MoMA, New York


The Metropolitan, New York

Words and their functions

The rainy weather encouraged me to do some brainstorming. Ideas were lined up in my head,occasionally overlapping one and other. It was hard trying to grasp the words from this hurricane of thoughts and safely place them on a piece of paper. How many weeks had it been since I saw my own handwriting?

There was too much that had caught my attention. I wrote one word, then scribbled and tried to find a better word. We were older now, weren't we? Maybe a synonym would look fancier.

I wrote, scribbled and wrote again until the whole page turned into a blob of ink. It just wasn't my day. I took the paper, curled it until it turned into a ball in my fist and threw it into the dust bin.

E.Y.

New York

The ice was getting thinner

We're not the same, dear, as we used to be
The seasons have changed and so have we
There was little we could say and even less that we could do
To stop the ice from getting thinner under me and you

We buried our love in the wintery grave
A lump in the snow was all that remained
But we stayed by its side, as the days turned to weeks
And the ice kept getting thinner with every word that we'd speak

When the spring arrived, we were taken by surprise
When the flows under our feet bled into the sea
And nothing was left for you and me

We're not the same dear and it seems to me
There's nowhere we can go with nothing underneath
Then it saddens me to say what we both knew was true
That the ice was getting thinner under me and you

The ice was getting thinner under me and you

By Death Cab for Cutie