News
Climate Protesters Target Monet Painting in Sweden
Activists smeared red paint on “The Artist’s Garden at Giverny” (1900) at the Nationalmuseum, warning that landscapes like the one depicted will “soon be a thing of the past.”
Sweden
Film
Absurdist Scandinavian Musings on Loneliness
Roy Andersson's About Endlessness presents a series of elaborate vignettes about isolated characters.
Art
The Afro Pick as a Symbol of Home
Simon Skinner, a Stockholm designer with Afro-Caribbean roots, is challenging the perceived homogeneity and whiteness of Sweden.
Art
This Colossal Goat Sculpture Is a Swedish Tradition, and Almost Every Year It Goes Up in Flames
Since the 1960s, the city of Gävle in Sweden has annually built a towering Yule goat, and almost every year someone burns it down.
News
The Country of Sweden Has a Phone Number and I Called It
Yesterday, Sweden became the first country to install its own phone number, inviting anyone around the world to dial in and connect with a random Swede.
In Brief
Swedish Supreme Court Rules Against Wikimedia for Database of Public Art Photos
The Supreme Court of Sweden ruled yesterday that Wikimedia Sverige (Sweden) violated the country's copyright laws by gathering and posting photographs of public artworks on a website, the Local Sweden reported.
Art
The Swedish House Built by 200 Million Clicks
Putting all of a country's dream home ideas into one design could easily result in abomination, an architectural version of the bubble-domed, smooth-driving "Homer" car from The Simpsons.
News
Undermined by Mining, Swedish Town Plans to Move Two Miles East
Kiruna, Sweden, must move or be destroyed. The state-run LKAB iron ore mine that was the impetus for the town in 1900 has dug so far below its streets, residents have to move or risk plunging into the earth.
Art
In Malmö, Street Art with a Social Conscience
MALMÖ — The capital of Skåne County, Sweden, enjoys a scenic coastal location, across the Öresund strait from Copenhagen, and has a strong creative output — in the words of one artist I met, it’s Sweden’s best city for street art.
Art
Sentenced: Swedish Artist Dan Park "Incited Against an Ethnic Group"
The imprisonment of artists and the shutting down of galleries by government agents are incidents we associate with North Korea, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia, not a progressive Scandinavian democracy.
Art
The Celestographs: August Strindberg's Alchemical Shots of the Night Sky
In the 1890s, Swedish playwright August Strindberg photographed the night sky without a camera or even a lens. These "Celestographs," as he called them, were both a folly and an innovative work of experimental art.
Opinion
Swedes to Apply Gender Ratings to Movies
Four Swedish film organizations are banding together to fight sexism by applying a letter-grade rating to new releases, the Independent reports. That's awesome news in and of itself, but the idea is even cooler because it's based on criteria that come from a comic strip by cartoonist Alison Bechdel.