I saw your piggy do a wee in our fountain

Our real subject for the day is how weird public art can be.

We went out today walking to art and food. On the way, we walked by this fountain. Part of the deal with fountains, at least when they are working, is that water comes out of spots chosen by the artist for some presumably interesting or aesthetic reason. In this one, water comes out of two pigs: the mouth of mother pig and the posterior of young junior here. Very realistic, well-executed sculptures of piggies. Maybe another homage to the great Danish pork industry?

Perhaps a bit belatedly, Sandy and I have gotten into a Terry Pratchett craze. He is a Brit science fiction writer who does not like to be called wacky. The first thing we both read was "The Hog Father," a send up of Santa Claus as he exists in a place called Ankh-Morpork, which makes Lagos look really well run and viable.

In it, the Hog Father delivers presents to good children in a airborne sleigh drawn by four large pigs. When they visit a department store, one child observes to the (fake) Hog Father, "I saw your piggy do a wee." Hence today's title.

Back to art and food. Sandy really wanted to go to Århus' modern art museum, ARoS (Aros was the name of the town in Viking times), to see a very large sculpture named, "Boy," who you can see here.

"Boy" is a very large, hyper realistic sculpture by Ron Mueck, who is well known for very large, slightly ominous sculptures of people. Danish parents are apparently known to tell their children that Boy got that big by eating his oatmeal, apparently with the intent to encourage rather than terrorize but we wonders, we does.

So after exposing ourselves to art, we went looking for food. Which in this case was almost the same thing. There was an exhibition of organic food products in a large exposition hall originally used as a riding school (or at least named for that) right next to the art museum.

I have been fascinated by food culture in Denmark, particularly the very ornate, almost sculptural open faced sandwichs called smørrebrød, so one of my colleagues at the university had recommended this exhibition as a good place to see and try some interesting ones. We did have some excellent smørrebrød. We also got to sample a lot of terrific cheese, sausage, bread, etc.

The exhibition certainly had a lot of interesting things, like these stuffed goats, next to a booth offering free range goat sausage. It was interesting to see how people reacted. Sandy, who quite likes goats, found it creepy. A two year old tried to feed one of them his apple.

The whole scene was fun, including a folk trio who were doing the greatest hits, both American and Scandinavian, of the folk music revival on both continents in the 1960s.

Interesting how you could see that as globalization of a sort, since these people had obviously listened to a lot of U.S. music, but complicated -- because a lot of that 1960s American folk revival music was Irish, Scots, Caribbean, African -- some performed by Americans like Pete Seeger, but quite a lot performed by people by Ewan MacColl, a Scotsman very popular in the U.S., who insisted in the 1960s that people should only sing their own traditional music.

Seems like a very complicated interdependence with lots of parallel development as well as a lot of back and forth. More on that later. I am getting really intrigued by this issue in music.