Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.10.2015, Síða 8

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In 2011, a teacher named
Þórarinn Hannesson
established the Poetry
House (“Ljóðasetur”)
in Siglufjörður, a small
fishing hamlet up north. Its operations
have been mostly funded by the founder
himself, with the help of various private
donors. The largest of those, a local sav-
ings bank, was recently taken over by a
much larger banking institution, Arion
Bank. Shortly after, Þórarinn learned
that Arion Bank is not particularly inter-
ested in sponsoring the Poetry House in
Siglufjörður.
Do poets need money? I thought
they lived on souls and human
happiness.
You are thinking of the Dementors, the
Harry Potter baddies. The Poetry House
is entirely run by volunteers, so it’s clear
the bank wasn’t saving millions of krónur
by cutting off the funding. Nope, the
now-discontinued grant totalled 2,100
Euros per annum. For a small organi-
zation, that kind of money goes a long
way. For an institution like Arion Bank,
that’s the sorta money they use to stuff
the cushions on the CEO’s personal lava-
tory. In the first half of 2015, Arion Bank
made a profit of 135 million Euros. And,
as we’ve learned, none of those Euros will
go towards running the Poetry House in
a small northern Icelandic town.
With that amount of money you
could stuff the CEO's toilet seat
and make some sort of crazy
mechanism that somehow uses
gold coins to flush.
Which makes the bank's reluctance to
support the Poetry House that much
more annoying, especially since the
bank's namesake is a legendary ancient
Greek poet. Þórarinn Hannesson and
other townspeople recently renovated
an old house to serve as a museum of Ice-
landic poetry, and a venue for readings.
It is not a very expensive institution to
run, but as a teacher, entrusted with the
Iceland’s youth, rather than its ones and
zeroes, Þórarinn is not exactly the kind of
person who can afford to light his Cuban
cigars with five hundred Euro bills. Very
much unlike the CEO of Arion Bank,
Höskuldur H. Ólafsson, who brought
home well over 350,000 Euros last year.
You need a big sofa for that many
cushions. You can flush a lot of
poop with that many gold coins.
Icelandic financial institutions have a
fairly long history of supporting Icelan-
dic art and culture. Banks in Iceland have
traditionally decorated their outposts
and offices with paintings and sculptures
by local artists. After the 2008 financial
crash, it was pointed out that when com-
bined, the art collections of the three
main banks amounted to one of Iceland’s
biggest museums.
Considering those institutions’
collective fuck-ups, it's a wonder
they haven't used the paintings as
toilet paper by now.
Banks all over the world patronize the
arts, but Iceland does not have a great
selection of private institutions and/or
persons of wealth to look to for patron-
age. Therefore, Iceland’s banks have his-
torically been been especially prominent
supporters of arts and culture. During
the bubble years, many Icelandic artists,
arts collectives and cultural organiza-
tions were funded in part or in full by the
nation’s blossoming banking institutions,
in what were commonly considered fairly
benevolent PR strategies. In general, art-
ists and writers do not make a lot of mon-
ey, but they do have relatively easy access
to media. Thus, when banks tossed a few
thousand Euros their way, they usually
received more than their money's worth
in terms of favourable media coverage.
You can't trust them. When poets
thought Voldemort was going to
win, they joined his side.
You’re still thinking of Dementors. We
are mostly not talking about Dementors.
Anyway. Those public relations exercises
were relatively benign. Before the crash,
Landsbankinn and its owners gained a
reputation as benevolent patrons of the
arts. After the collapse, their reputation
plummeted as quickly as their stock mar-
ket value. Two events have become par-
ticularly notorious.
I love stories of money-crazed
bankers. Did they force painters
to act as footstools in their rich
person saunas? Were poets made
to scrub banker taint?
The people who got rich during the Ice-
landic Bubble were not sophisticated
enough for that kind of debauchery.
These were businessmen from a commu-
nity of a few hundred thousand people
who suddenly found themselves rolling
in money. They were small-town people
who got rich and never quite outgrew
that classy small-town way of maximal
thinking. The two events both involved
Björgólfur Guðmundsson, one of the
owners of Landsbankinn and its chair-
man, wanting to avoid embarrassment.
In 2004, the bank opened a facility with
free studios. It was managed by a gallery,
Kling & Bang. During the opening, the
gallery was supposed to be represented
by artist Snorri Ásmundsson. However,
since he had been convicted of a few pet-
ty crimes in his youth, the chairman was
worried that it would be bad for his image
to be seen in such foul company.
And nowadays it would be bad for
the image of the petty criminal
to be seen in the chairman's
company.
The other event was when a large book
publisher owned by Björgólfur Guð-
mundsson published a book, by histo-
rian Guðmundur Magnússon, about
the family of the bank chairman's wife.
The book contained a section about her
former marriage to George Lincoln
Rockwell, founder of the American
Nazi Party, who manages to make for
even more embarrassing company than
a bank chairman. The entire first edi-
tion, which contained the offending
chapter, was destroyed, and a new edi-
tion was published which barely men-
tioned Rockwell. I suppose it is only
fitting that a Nazi ex-husband would be
the cause of a secret book burning.
So What's This I Keep Hearing
About Some Bank Cutting Off
Poets, Denying Them Precious Money?
Literature | Finance
I C E L A N D 4 D U M M I E S
Words by Kári Tulinius
Illustration by Lóa Hjálmtýsdóttir
8
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16 — 2015
Iceland’s National Church,
Þjóðkirkjan, has been on a lot of
folks’ minds this month, after the
spotlight was shone on the “free-
dom of conscience” exemption
that ministers have if they want to
refuse to marry a same-sex couple
for personal religious reasons. Crit-
ics charge that the exemption is
unconstitutional, with the National
Queer Organisation announcing that
they are considering taking the State
to court over the matter. The church
has countered that it is unlikely that
any minister would refuse to marry a
same-sex couple, and in a poll of 131
ministers conducted by Fréttablaðið,
only two said they would evoke the
exemption.
One of our most popular stories
of late highlighted that literally
thousands of foreigners are need-
ed to fill jobs, both existing and yet to
come, in the tourism industry. This
estimate is itself based on estimates,
though, as it is predicted that some
1.5 million people will visit Iceland
next year. That’s about five times
the actual population of the country.
Maybe we should kill two birds with
one stone and just hire tourists for
the jobs? Only time will tell.
Everybody loves skyr. Some
people love skyr so much that
they go around calling things skyr
that clearly aren’t skyr. Arla, a Swed-
ish company, has been marketing
a product they refer to as “skyr” in
Scandinavia, even evoking quaint
rural Icelandic imagery for their TV
spots. None too pleased with this,
Iceland Dairies filed an injunction
against Arla to stop using the word
“skyr” to describe the product. And,
they won. By the time you read this,
every Arla product that claims an as-
sociation with skyr should be com-
pletely off the shelves in Finland.
Pahoillani, Suomi!
Whaling season has come to a
close again. In all, 184 whales—29
minke whales and 155 fin whales—
were hunted.
So it goes.
By Paul Fontaine
NEWS
IN
BRIEF