As disturbing as it may be to the modernist establishment, Nerdrum
may thus represent the wave of the future in painting. He has fared
extremely well on the most cutting-edge of all phenomena, the Internet.
There are many websites devoted to Nerdrum, both official (from his
galleries) and unofficial.^4 The great advantage of the Internet is that it
weakens the power of all establishments and especially cultural media-
tors, allowing people to communicate their views directly, without being
monitored by so-called experts or authorities in the field. If one looked
at official academic discourse on contemporary painting, Nerdrum
would not be featured prominently, if discussed at all, but if one looks at
the Internet, he clearly has a wide following. In December 1999 one of
the most useful art sites on the Web, artcyclopedia.com, ran a poll to
find out: “Who is producing the most interesting art today?” The results
were announced in February, 2000 and Odd Nerdrum came in second,
surpassed only by Andrew Wyeth, and followed by Chuck Close, Cindy
Sherman, Mark Tansey, Carole Hand, Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin, Dale
Chihuly, and Bill Viola. This list suggests that the voters were biased in
favor of figurative art, but in any case, it is a rather distinguished group
in which Nerdrum finds himself. I happen to know one person involved
in artcyclopedia.com and checked with him about the reliability of this
poll. He reassured me that there were no anomalies in the voting and that
“the polling was strictly scientific in its tabulation” (the sample was
small—under a thousand people). The person who ran the poll did sug-
gest that one reason Nerdrum might have done so well is that he had
been featured in July 1999 as “artist of the month” on the website. One
should not make too much of this one poll, but one should not entirely
discount or dismiss the results either. Nerdrum is clearly catching on
with the general public. The modernist establishment may have known
what it was doing all these years of trying to keep Nerdrum’s paintings
off the walls of museums. His work is a genuine threat to the dominance
of the modernist aesthetic.II
Nerdrum’s career as an artist has been one long struggle against mod-
ernism, and as such he demonstrates the intolerance of an artistic estab-
lishment that publicly professes to be pluralist and open to all artistic
possibilities, but in fact rejects anyone who fundamentally questions its
assumptions. Like many artists, Nerdrum was precocious and began to
demonstrate an eye for form and color at an early age. Thus Nerdrum’s
encounter with and struggle against modernism began in his childhood:8 Paul A. Cantor