Next time I make it to Oslo, the Nation­al Muse­um of Art, Archi­tec­ture and Design ranks high on my to-do list. The next time I make it to Oslo will also count as the first time I make it to Oslo, since the ten­den­cy of the city itself to rank high on the world’s-most-expen­sive places lists (and at the very top of some of those lists) has thus far scared me off of book­ing a flight there. But if you can han­dle Oslo’s for­mi­da­ble cost of liv­ing, the Nation­al Muse­um’s branch­es only charge you the equiv­a­lent of five bucks or so for admis­sion. And now they’ve offered an even cheap­er alter­na­tive: 30,000 works of art from their col­lec­tion, view­able online for free.

If it all seems over­whelm­ing, you can view the Nation­al Muse­um’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion in sec­tions of high­lights: one of pre-1945 works, one of post-1945 works, and one of Edvard Munch. While few of us could con­fi­dent­ly call our­selves experts in Nor­we­gian art, all of us know the work of Munch — or at least we know a work of Munch, 1893’s The Scream (Skrik), whose black-garbed cen­tral fig­ure, clutch­ing his gaunt fea­tures twist­ed into an expres­sion of pure agony, has gone on to inspire count­less homages, par­o­dies, and iron­ic greet­ing cards. But Munch, whose career last­ed well over half a cen­tu­ry and involved print­mak­ing as well as paint­ing, did­n’t become Nor­way’s best-known artist on the strength of The Scream alone.

The Nation­al Muse­um’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion offers per­haps your best oppor­tu­ni­ty to begin to get a sense of the scope of Munch’s art. There you can take an up-close look at (and even down­load) such pieces as the less ago­nized Melan­choly (Melankoli), paint­ed one year before The Scream; 1901’s The Girls on the Bridge, a more placid treat­ment of a sim­i­lar set­ting; and even, so you can get to know the artist bet­ter still, Munch’s 1895 self-por­trait with a cig­a­rette. He may not exact­ly look hap­py in it, but at least he has­n’t become a visu­al short­hand for all-con­sum­ing pain like the poor fel­low he paint­ed on the bridge. (If you want my guess as to what made the sub­ject of The Scream so unhap­py, I’d say he just fin­ished look­ing into aver­age Oslo rents.)

A big thanks to Joakim for mak­ing us aware of this col­lec­tion. If any oth­er read­ers know of great resources we can fea­ture on the site, please send us a tip here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edvard Munch’s Famous Paint­ing The Scream Ani­mat­ed to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Pri­mal Music

The Guggen­heim Puts Online 1600 Great Works of Mod­ern Art from 575 Artists

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Rijksmu­se­um Dig­i­tizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Mas­ter­pieces Includ­ed!

Down­load 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Res­o­lu­tion from The Get­ty

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Mul­ti­col­ored Mar­i­lyn Mon­roes, a can of Camp­bel­l’s soup, that sil­ver wig, some vague but impor­tant role in the for­ma­tion of the Vel­vet Under­ground — how much, apart from a scat­ter­ing of cul­tur­al scraps such as these, does any of us real­ly know about Andy Warhol, one of the defin­ers of art in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry? Ear­li­er this year, we fea­tured a video from John Green and Sarah Urist Green’s The Art Assign­ment that made the case for Andy Warhol in three min­utes. Assum­ing you accept its argu­ment, where to look next to cul­ti­vate a deep­er appre­ci­a­tion of the man who pro­duced those Mar­i­lyns and Camp­bel­l’s soup cans, wore that sil­ver wig, and presided over the envi­ron­ment in which the likes of the Vel­vet Under­ground could take shape?

Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life, not just an insti­tu­tion but a pro­lif­ic mak­er of edu­ca­tion­al videos, has dou­bled down on the case for Andy Warhol with a six-minute video of their own, which comes as the first in their series of short primers on fig­ures from art and archi­tec­ture. (See a com­plete playlist of those videos below.) “Andy Warhol was the most glam­orous fig­ure of 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can art,” de Bot­ton unequiv­o­cal­ly states, adding that his “great achieve­ment was to devel­op a gen­er­ous and help­ful view of two major forces in mod­ern soci­ety: com­merce and celebri­ty.”

With­in this frame­work, the les­son finds “four big ideas behind Andy Warhol’s work, which can teach us a more inspired way of look­ing at the world and prompt us to build a bet­ter soci­ety” — and which, in this tech­no­log­i­cal age of which Warhol him­self could only dream, have become more eas­i­ly imple­mentable than ever.

These ideas, on which the video elab­o­rates ver­bal­ly and visu­al­ly, have to do with (1) appre­ci­at­ing life by exam­in­ing the stuff of it — such as a hum­ble soup can — more close­ly, (2) improv­ing the work­ings of soci­ety by dis­trib­ut­ing glam­or dif­fer­ent­ly, grant­i­ng high­er sta­tus to maids and show­ing the nation the Pres­i­dent clean­ing a toi­let once in a while, (3) approach­ing busi­ness as a par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ing form of art while dis­trib­ut­ing art more wide­ly by approach­ing it as a busi­ness, and (4) using an open and non-vin­dic­tive per­son­al­i­ty as a kind of “brand” to unite seem­ing­ly dis­parate artis­tic and com­mer­cial ven­tures into a coher­ent whole. Will any of this get you shop­ping for a Mar­i­lyn print of your own? It may or may not, but you won’t come away with­out a bit of inspi­ra­tion for how to take your own pur­suits to a new, more Warho­lian lev­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Case for Andy Warhol in Three Min­utes

Watch the Uncen­sored Andy Warhol-Direct­ed Video for The Cars’ Hit “Hel­lo Again” (NSFW)

Andy Warhol Shoots “Screen Tests” of Nico, Bob Dylan & Sal­vador Dalí

Andy Warhol’s 1965 Film, Vinyl, Adapt­ed from Antho­ny Burgess’ A Clock­work Orange

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear­ing some­one dis­cuss the nature of art can eas­i­ly grow tire­some — indeed, it has, as a sub­ject, become some­thing of a short­hand for the tire­some. But Mar­cel Duchamp, the French painter, sculp­tor, con­cep­tu­al artist, and chess enthu­si­ast, could do it right. He did it by get­ting straight to the point, a suc­cinct­ness most famous­ly demon­strat­ed in Foun­tain, the sim­ple, every­day porce­lain uri­nal he signed and sub­mit­ted as a work of art for dis­play. The fact that the art world soon put Foun­tain (and its sim­i­lar, mass-pro­duced descen­dants) quite lit­er­al­ly on a pedestal makes an obser­va­tion about art more clean­ly than thou­sands of words on the role of the artist in mod­ern soci­ety ever could.

But where–whether you paint on a can­vas, chis­el into a block of stone, or make a pur­chase at the plumb­ing store down the street–does this impulse to make art come from? Do artists con­scious­ly cre­ate their work, act­ing out cre­ative deci­sions made with­in, or do they mere­ly give form to artis­tic impuls­es received from… else­where? And what do we talk about when we talk about the work of art the artist ulti­mate­ly pro­duces?

Duchamp, con­cise as ever, addressed the issue in 1957 when he gave the eight-minute lec­ture “The Cre­ative Act” which you can hear above (or on the full Sur­re­al­ism Reviewed album avail­able on Spo­ti­fy below). He iden­ti­fies one impor­tant part of the process as what he calls the “art coef­fi­cient.”

“In the cre­ative act,” Duchamp says, “the artist goes from inten­tion to real­iza­tion through a chain of total­ly sub­jec­tive reac­tions. His strug­gle toward the real­iza­tion is a series of efforts, pains, sat­is­fac­tion, refusals, deci­sions, which also can­not and must not be ful­ly self-con­scious, at least on the aes­thet­ic plane. The result of this strug­gle is a dif­fer­ence between the inten­tion and its real­iza­tion, a dif­fer­ence which the artist is not aware of.” This gap between what the artist “intend­ed to real­ize and did real­ize,” Duchamp calls the art coef­fi­cient, “an arith­meti­cal rela­tion between the unex­pressed but intend­ed and the unin­ten­tion­al­ly expressed.”

But none of it mat­ters, in Ducham­p’s think­ing, unless some­one else actu­al­ly thinks about the work of art. “No work of art — no bal­loon dog, no poem men­tion­ing cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thir­ty-three-sec­ond per­for­mance by silent musi­cians — is a great work until pos­ter­i­ty says so,” writes the Paris Review’s Rebec­ca Bates in a post on the lec­ture (and a “sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs” recent­ly made out of it). She quotes Duchamp in a 1964 inter­view with Calvin Tomkins: “The artist pro­duces noth­ing until the onlook­er has said, ‘You have pro­duced some­thing mar­velous.’ The onlook­er has the last word in it.” Accord­ing to Ducham­p’s per­cep­tions, we, as pos­ter­i­ty, as the onlook­ers, have the last word on all work, even Ducham­p’s own. So go ahead and yam­mer a bit about the nature of art; doing so not only keeps the art alive, but made it art in the first place.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

Anémic Ciné­ma: Mar­cel Duchamp’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926)

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.