How hard can it be!?

roundabout dog [round-uh-bout dawg] A little story about roundabout dogs that can be seen all over Sweden. This is were it all started... Definition: Non-professionally produced sculptural art in the form of a dog or other animal made from any material which, often concealed by the darkness of the night, is placed in a public place, preferably in a roundabout. Background: It all started a couple a years ago with somebody smashing a dog to pieces, that is, not a living dog but a man-made one. A dog that was part of an art installation, an artistic dog if you may. It was the artist Stina Opitz who had been given the task to decorate one of the many roundabouts that had been built in the Tornby area in Linköping, Sweden. This means that somebody demolished the concrete dog made by Stina Opitz, an act which was given appropriate attention in the local papers. A time thereafter someone, later identified as “the Academy Vreta monastery”, replaced the slaughtered and subsequently carried out the origin dog with a homemade of plywood. It was pretty Goofy, flat and ugly, yet very encouraging in any way. Shortly thereafter this wooden dog got a concrete bone to chew on and as time has passed various pieces of art have appeared both in this roundabout and others all over Sweden. The involved amateur artists apparently seem to see no limits as regards choice of material, quality, size or even type of animal. Dogs are also moved from one roundabout to another, and some are stolen or demolished. It is a dog’s life after all, isn’t it? The dogs give rise to everything from cheers to cranky comments on traffic safety. They have also made local bureaucrats and politicians on the cultural scene to threaten with confiscation and institutionalisation of these pieces of art and place them in one – by them – selected roundabout or even in the local museum, suggestions which have upset some of the artists.