Off to Louisiana

WiseMan has to get back to work, but since all I need to work is my laptop, I can continue staying in the woods for a while. He was leaving from Copenhagen (via Kiel to say "Hej då, Löwe" with 10.000 other fanatics) so I decided to tag along with an Öresund rundt ticket. 249 Swedish crowns (about 25 Euros) gets you a two-day ticket on all busses and trains in Skåne and Greater Copenhagen, as well as the boats between Helsingør and Helsingborg. You are supposed to take the boat one way and the bridge the other, but no one bothers to scratch off the direction that you go, so I assume you could spend all day on the boat if you wanted to (and people do, drinking a lot).

There was a horrific train delay, good job we took the train that was to be in Copenhagen 1 1/2 hours before his train time and not 1/2 hour, as the train was 45 minutes delayed, some feat on a one-hour train ride. He disembarked at the main train station and I carried on up to Humlebæk (with delays all the way). In all it took me 2 1/2 hours to get up there.

But it was a gorgeous day, and the walk down to Louisiana was very nice. This Museum of Modern Art is beautifully located above the Öresund Straights. They had an exhibition about "green archicture". It seems architects have just discovered ecology, but they still need remedial work on mathematics. One nice display comparing large cities by their "DNA" - population density, murders per inhabitant, electricity use per inhabitant, etc. was good idea. But looking closely at the graphics I saw that New York had three times the energy consumption per capita of Berlin, but the graphic was 9 times as large! They increased *both* dimensions by three, causing a nine-fold increase in the visual area of the symbols. Straight out of "How to Lie with Statistics".

They had a few new things outdoors, one was the green Moebus strip pictured above that came with an instruction booklet that I didn't understand. The other was a house build of PET bottles - specifically designed with a jigsaw-like lock that could - after use - be filled with sand and or garbage and linked together to make a house.

They just had a birthday last year or so and many collectors and even the Danish government were generous and helped them buy more things. I liked the one where the artist threw some caviar at a canvas, glued them tight, and then numbered each one. Unfortunately, I forgot to write down his or her name. I liked the Olafur Eliasson installation with lights that makes your eyes see things that are not there. And there was a fun one with black and white figures that turned out to be from Jean Dubuffet. There were a few photos by Richard Avedon, very, very vivid ones that make me want to see more.

The posters were all far-out stuff or a Picasso scribble that they probably paid a fortune for. The gift shop had cute stuff, but very expensive. At least the book I wanted to buy was on special price....

As I was leaving, I wondered if people forget to take the coins with them that the lockers give back to you. I wandered down the row of lockers, inspecting each one. Indeed, I got not one, not two, but three 20-Danish-Crown coins, enough for a sandwich and coke on the train back home.