Stockholm, Sweden: August 10, 2005

10/05/2020
Travel

Today we went to the Natural Museum. I did not understand the theme to one of the displays/exhibits. It was of fairly modern/traditional things people use in their homes today. The Conceptual Art display was very thought provoking. I enjoyed it a lot while thinking of various poetic versus. My favorite pieces were very powerful and politically based; almost borderline controversial. The first piece is a red metal bench that is designed as a bench with graffiti, but the artists’ name makes up the bench. His name is Muungol; meaning unite. Lashing out against segregation was his purpose as was the message behind the following piece. It is a wooden door with a standard metal handle and a mail slot. The twist behind that is it had several (at least 20-30) peepholes decorating the door. The message here was while segregation and prejudice exist, people say such filth and exhale such hatred behind closed doors and form the comfort of their own homes. They have the advantage, being able to see out without being seen and leaving the subject victim to slander without a chance to defend themselves. The third and final piece I hold in high regard is a children’s reading chart (it mimicked an ABC chart) of symbols that they see while growing up (e.g., playboy bunny, the Swastika, Nike, Disney). The message is children do not need to learn the meaning of these symbols directly. Continuous exposure bombards the child and teaches them to associate the symbols with self-taught concepts and media images. These are later structured by proper and direct force-fed education. Media is the substitute teacher.

After the museum we went to the shopping/more active part of Stockholm. It is like a long continuous shopping center. Here we saw the movie “Wedding Crashers.” Seeing a movie normally would not be too thought provoking except when we got the tickets they were assigned seats. This just enforced my idea about the Swedes' organization, precision, and utilization of space. Furthermore, the woman selling us the tickets told us that when she was in the states, going to the movies just about killed her, especially when coming into a movie late.