The brilliant Swedish film, "The Square" is about modern art and so much more. It is a bit of a thriller and holds one's attention throughout. Yes, it does satirize the art world. One of the exhibits in the X-Royal Museum are multiple mounds of ashes, all identical. When the museum cleaner inadvertently sweeps up some of the mounds, the museum staff panics, until the curator comes up with the idea of taking the ashes out of the vacuum cleaner bag and simply replacing the mounds the way they were before. No one is the wiser. But the film deals with a more important question regarding modern art and museum exhibitions. If one took an ordinary object, like a purse or a chair, and placed it in a museum, does that make it a work of art? This is explored in many ways. A performance artist portrays a wild animal, but he gets carried away to the point where it is no longer performance, he has become a savage beast. The key art work explored in the movie, is "The Square". An Argentinian artist has created a lit up square in front of the museum, which symbolizes a place one can step into to experience equality, and peace. This is a Utopian vision that is soon shattered, as The Square blurs with the city square and becomes social reality around and outside the museum. The director, Ruben Ostlund, enforces this with visual squares throughout. Even the eerie music lends itself to this concept. Surprisingly, Swedish society is more like our own than I would have thought. There is evidently no safety net for the many beggars and European Union refugees. As a result there is a pronounced inequality, as seen when toughs in a poor neighborhood, throw detritus at the curator's Tesla. He begins the movie wrapped in his own elite world in which "The Square" is clearly an art piece but nothing more. He ends totally transformed. And therein I think the director is showing us that art is not just an object in a museum, but something that has the power to affect us all.
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