ABSTRACT
Jan von Bonsdorff The Inertia of the Canon: Nationalist Projections onto the Works of Hans
Brüggemann and Bernt Notke
At the end of 2004 the Danish minister of culture, Brian Mikkelsen, commissioned panels of experts from different spheres of cultural life to formulate an official “Canon of Danish Art and Culture”. The canon was to contain “the greatest, most important works of Denmark’s cultural heritage”.1 Each panel, consisting of five members, was instructed to choose twelve works from different categories, including literature, music, and the visual arts. From nine areas, a total of 108 works were thus selected, and the resulting canon was published as a book and on the net in the autumn of 2006. The books were distributed free of charge to most Danish schools and other educational establishments-“as a yardstick for quality-a yardstick that will obviously be constantly challenged and discussed”. Of course, this kind of centrally orchestrated, politically engineered, and painfully reductive simplification of a cultural past could not and did not pass unchallenged. The project has been the subject of intense debate in Scandinavia: among other artists, for example, the filmmaker Lars von Trier protested vehemently against his own inclusion in the canon. And yet some political parties in the other Scandinavian countries have placed the establishment of similar canons on their agendas.
