Teemu Mäki and many others have written, thoughtfully, about art’s mission and significance. The matter pops up in my mind quite often. And it bothers me. Now and then I find that I’m an art police, who declares that something, that has been named as art and is sold as such, is not art. Like yesterday when I blurted, for the nth time, that the opening exhibition of Amos Rex, executed by teamLab, is not art. That said, I thought I don’t want to say such phrases. Why? I don’t want to raise myself up to a position of a person who defines what is art, by negation. I expressed my opinion, and am standing behind it, but at table with friends, who are not artists but art lovers, I felt I was lifting myself up to a position I didn’t want – an art authority. Luckily, in this company, my fear was superfluous, and art was filling one of its tasks, making us talk.

It is great that people are queueing to an art museum. They want to see and experience a phenomenon that has been named as art. I liked the room where you could color a flower, crocodile, bird, butterfly that you could then hunt and admire. It was a joyful play, that art pushed us into. To play together.

Elsewhere in the exhibition I sank into dystopian vibrations. Is this the future: we visit museums in order to watch artificial skies and seas and forests, that don’t exist anymore. Maybe teamLab is urging us to go to the sea side to watch, listen, feel, smell the real sea; to lie down onto the ground on a starry night to watch the sky. Before it is too late.

A horrible thought: can we still see the sea, forest, sky, stone, other living being if it is not framed for us to see? (The frame states, that the framed thing is worth to stop for.) Can we still wonder, stop to wonder at something that is not framed? Hey, stop blabbering! Of course we can!

The landscape above, which I snapped in Vuokatti, is blue compared to Qiu Shihua‘s white fields, but still it reminds me of those.