Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

* the Guardian follows up on a story to which Matthias Wivel brought our attention yesterday, some limited political fall-out from a campaign poster that references the 2005 publication of Muhammed caricatures in a Denmark newspaper and the riots, boycotts and political protests that followed in 2006.

* the high profile Danish Muslim candidate Asmaa Abdol-Hamid answered the poster ("Freedom of expression is Danish, censorship is not") with one of her own ("Freedom of expression is Danish, stupidity is not"), and declared that no one feels these cartoons are an issue any longer.

* Erik Melander was nice enough to send in these notes on a mention in a wire story that I mentioned here about Lars Vilks cartoons:

Hello, while the fact that galleries refused to exhibit Lars Vilks drawings of Muhammed as a dog, it is rarely said what kind of galleries they were. Being a swede, that information is readily available through swedish media.

The first gallery was the Tallerud Art appreciation society. Tallerud being the name of the community house of Alster parish (and can be seen on the second picture on this web site. Alster Parish consists of a village surrounded by farmland and is located some kilometers north of the city Karlstad. The only figure I could find of the number of inhabitants in the parish is from 1973 and claims a population of 1404. It was the society that asked Vilks to contribute to an exhibition with the theme dogs in art and to which he sent the ink drawings of Muhammed as a dog.

The second gallery was an exhibit at a small Art college in Bohuslan named Gerleborgsskolan. It has, according to its webpage, 620 students.

The third gallery did not receive a submission from Vilks before the news of the drawings had reached the media (but before the editorial at Narikes Allehanda was published). This "gallery" was the National Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm.

Vilks has been criticized in Sweden for what some say were the calculating way that he submitted the drawings to the first two exhibitions, that were almost certain to reject them, and then use this to build publicity. Especially as he is the author of the book Hur man blir en samtidskonstnar pa tre dagar (translated loosely as "How to become a contemporary artist in three days"), which was written in 2005 and is a book about art and how to market it.

Thank you, Erik.
 
posted 10:18 pm PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives