From a visit to Malmö Konsthall yesterday afternoon. The have-a-go workshop is of course familiar from UK museums, particularly during school holidays. What was quite a surprise for me was that here, this stuff is just sat there, waiting to be used, without permission or supervision or justification… I’m pretty sure I could have just sat myself down with an easel and got to work, and no one would much have minded at all.

(I didn’t. But maybe I will.)

Among the challenges of moving to any new place, but perhaps in particular a place that still has a patina of social-democratic utopianism as seen from your place-of-origin, is the challenge of avoiding the temptation to see only the things that confirm your wisdom in having moved there. This sort of hey-it’s-YOUR-museum just-get-on-with-it vibe is an obvious object for that temptation, echoing as it does the Scandinavian allemansrätten or right-to-roam — though it’s worth noting that the latter implicitly contains an injunction to treat the common resource with respect, and one presumes a similar assumption nestles within the Konsthall workshop space, too.

I’m thinking here of things like enclosure, and the grotesque fiction of the “tragedy of the commons”, which is less a historical theory than one of capitalism’s self-fulfilling prophecies… but I’m clearly going to have to spend a lot more time reading up on the realities of these things before I get into any serious pontification. (After all, I’m a proper academic now — I can’t go around making half-baked sociological claims on the basis of anecdotal evidence!)