The Best Way to Get Through This Decade

Denmark’s Museum Act requires state-recognised museums to develop their collections through knowledge-based and coordinated collecting, documentation and deaccessioning.

Since January 2025, following the 2024 Museum Reform , Danish state-recognised museums have had to meet minimum visitor and income thresholds to retain state recognition and funding, while part of the subsidy is explicitly tied to measurable performance. The law asks museums to develop collections, knowledge and dissemination; the funding system increasingly rewards them for visitors, children and young people, income and research output. These are not the same priorities, and when they compete, the funding formula gives some of them a measurable advantage.

In 2019, seventy-three portrait drawings by Damien Hirst were donated to the British Museum by his former business manager, Frank Dunphy, under the UK’s Cultural Gifts Scheme , a mechanism that allows donated art to be exchanged for a tax reduction. It is a legal, unremarkable transaction, repeated constantly across national collections, and a reminder that some artists enter permanent collections through donation and accounting as much as through curatorial judgement.

In 2010, Bob Dylan showed The Brazil Series at Statens Museum for Kunst, followed by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, who filled ARKEN with more than 130 works for her fortieth jubilee in 2012. Neither show needs to be dismissed on its merits to notice what it is also for. Wealth, recognition and royalty are the fastest route into a respectable institution because they bring people through the door. Under a funding model built on door-counts, social status actually matters as much as any other curatorial claim. Exhibitions calibrated for footfall rather than argument can draw extraordinary crowds that ordinary contemporary programming rarely can.

Interestingly, a third, newer mechanism runs in the opposite direction. Danish museums and public television have recently elevated a range of hobbyist and self-taught artists: a knitter, a maker of oversized trolls from scrap wood, contestants on an amateur painting talent show. Not fame buying legitimacy, but ordinariness performing it, precisely because these artists are untrained.

Kunstkritikk’s Louise Steiwer named this dynamic clearly this summer (2026) in her essay Amatørens time :

There is a fundamentally romantic figure at work here: the classical artist-genius has re-entered the stage, now in the form of the amateur. The artist in a double role as the eccentric, the man (because it is almost always a man) whom, on the one hand, we do not need to be afraid of, but who, on the other hand, stands outside the established and can become the voice of ordinary common sense. It is the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who teaches us that the established Copenhagen salons have no clothes on, and that talent does not need to be dressed in a veneer of education or professionalism in order to break through.

The eccentric artist, as he is portrayed in The Artists’ Colony or in exhibitions of hobby artists, is not representative of the average Danish visual artist’s practice, working methods, or challenges.

The working day of the vast majority of professional artists resembles that of other sole proprietorships far more than it resembles romantic ideas of inspired natural talent. And if we highlight the latter rather than the former, the conversation about artists’ working conditions, their rights to unemployment benefits, parental leave, or even a reasonably fair income comes to a halt.

Each individual decision can be defended:

• a television programme attracts an audience by featuring an amateur artist;
• in Denmark, a royal exhibition brings huge audiences;
• displaying paintings by a world-famous singer-songwriter attracts visitors;
• a law connects funding to visitor numbers, with an emphasis on children and young people;
• an institution responds rationally to those incentives by adjusting its programming to meet funding criteria;
• the New York Times publishes an article about trolls built from recycled materials at ARKEN;

It is all good fun and very entertaining. The best way to get through this decade seems to be to buy a ticket to the show. But what the state financially rewards museums for doing well is not identical to what they are legally constituted to preserve and develop. And over time, the accumulation of these choices determines what is present in the institutional record, and perhaps more consequentially for future generations, what is not.

So here is the question: Is a statutory duty to develop collections enough to stop a funding formula from quietly deciding the record of this decade?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. And subsequently, if the artists most easily rewarded by museums are the ones who already have a high social status, the eccentric artist, or the amateur reviving the male artist-genius and performing their way onto national television, what will Denmark’s public collections actually have documented about the art of this decade twenty years from now?