1. The television series “Thomas och den vanskelige kunsten” in NRK is a humble and approachable introduction to the art – and to contemporary art “that to 98% is rubbish”. Quite true. And the 2% is probably still painting or sculpture of any kind, more or less traditional, but with quality and originality.

2. It is above all the 98% that are exposed on the art market and in the institutional art halls. Thus, the lack of discernment, which is particularly strange in an age where for example Internet at all is impossible to manage without this property. In the history of art this necessary filtering is already a fact. Odd Nerdrum will survive Bjarne Melgaard.

3. For something presented as art, one can ask a relevant question: Will this remain art?

4. Painting and the expanded field: it’s not the painting that is in crisis but its wider – or thinner – field. Meta art levels. A work of art must be as strong in itself that voluminous texts and installations are not needed. Art should be more playful than cerebral.

5. The beauty is not skin-deep. The ugly is not deep at all. The visual can not be replaced. Art requires a craftsmanship in the bottom that is equal for all, specialists and amateurs. To exceed the limits, there must be a visual center of knowledge. The color, shape and image is art’s timeless fundamentals.

6. If the artist would like to become an author, filmmaker or actor so à la bonne heure – but visual art is left where you leave it, as well as nature. All artifacts can become art, if only for a second, but everything can’t remain art. Anti-art, however, remains anti-art.

7. What Duchamp did cannot be repeated. Yet the conceptual art is treading water exactly 100 years later. The only really new art movements in our time are graffiti and street art.

8. The “art world” as an institution at the top of the pyramid is a mirror image of the State hierarchy in which curators the middle classthe artists are the proletariat. The audience at the bottom is the powerless onlookers.

9. The Situationists wanted to simultaneously exceed and realize art by creating revolutionary minds instead of art objects. This is because they saw the attempts to break the bourgeois continuity from Dada and beyond recuperated and thus failed. “The future of art works will consists in a passionate life” (Raoul Vaneigem).

10. A contemporary phenomenon as a flashmob could be an artwork in situationistic significance, in the alternative a participatory performance art, social sculpture or happening. To create a situation means to create a revolutionary situation and the ultimate work of art here is ofcourse the world revolution which will make every human an artist (Beuys) and creativity becomes generalized.

Until then is needed more than ever what remains of creativity, imagination, aesthetics, romanticism, skill, color, creativity and passion. Visual art’s all sophisticated techniques should be used politically, not only by specialized artists or an elite but by all, to one day be able to do the petrified world vibrant, just and free, to dance again.

— Staffan Jacobson, Ph.D. Art History, Lund, Sweden.