I'm in Madrid with my wife. We went to the Reina Sofia Museum to see the Wolfgang Laib and Luis Gordillo exhibtions. My wife adores Laib's yellow pollen and I wanted to see Gordillo's paintings that puzzle me. I feel they could be the best paintings in the world but I don't want to admit it to myself, because they seem to be painting for painting's sake. And I demand art about Molotov cocktails in bottles of sake. Maybe I'm too narrow-minded.

We are spending more money than we should and could. We stay in Hotel de las Letras, a trendy design hotel in Gran Vía and had yesterday an amazing dinner at Asiana Taller. During the day, it's an Asian antiques shop and in the evening the most fashionable restaurant in the town. The food was absolutely splendid hit mix of methods and ingredients of the Mediterranean and the Far East. My wife said she liked the food too, even though, before the dinner in the Hotel spa, she burnt her tongue with boiling tea that I served her believing it was cold beer.

Yesterday (7-7-7), Andrea and Olivier and their daughters had lunch in our place. They praised my Gazpacho de Finlandia, what is my favorite appetizer in the summer time. I think Olivier liked my gin & tonics too, because he had five of them. It's really hot here and it's important to drink enough.

 

GAZPACHO DE FINLANDIA

Ingredients
Tomatoes
Cucumber
Green peppers
Carrot
Onion
Garlic (Did you know that Berlusconi wants to ban garlic in Italy?)
Olive oil
Vinegar
Salt and pepper
Iced water

Method
Process everything in a blender until smooth. Chill in the fridge. Pass through a stainer to obtain liquid without chunks. Mix three parts gazpacho and one part Finlandia vodka. Serve in chilled shot glasses.

My Artfacts.net ranking has risen in few weeks from 15.512 to 9.498. I don't understand what has happened but it feels great to be in the Top 10.000. I'm one of the ten thousand most famous artists in the world! And the best is that now my ranking is better than my best friend Jani's, his position is 11.355. The next target is to get in the Top 5.000, which is extremely difficult. I just checked Tellervo's ranking. She studied with me and graduated one year after me. Her ranking is only 4272 though she is in almost every biennial you can imagine. Artfacts.net ranks almost 85.000 artists. The Top 5 are Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys.

I'm painting but not in my studio, where it's too hot to work: I'm fixing the walls of the house. It's at least 200 years old building and whatever you do the paint falls down every year. It must have been painted at least 200 times.

My daughter is painting with her fingers in the patio. She does abstract stuff on a huge piece of paper. I envy her. She's really good in it. I'm seriously going to have my series of 10 paintings - started more than a year ago - finished by 31st of December. I'm slow but I'll do it.

Now people think about holiday destinations. My favorites are Bujumbura, Addis Abeba, Kinshasa, Lilongwe, Monrovia, Bissau, Naypyidaw, Asmara, Freetown, Kigali, Niamey, Antananarivo, Kampala, Anjul, Dodoma, Kabul, Conakry, Kathmandu, Lomé and Dili, but we go to Finland like every year.

Should art be easy to understand? Or can it be difficult like quantum mechanics or preparing paella? I think of my idol Kippenberger, who is one of the most acclaimed artists and rather difficult too: if you take just one of his paintings or objects, it probably looks boring crap. You must know about art in general and his oeuvre and context to get it. This is how I defended my baseball bat, when my wife said it looks indifferent conceptual art.

She's right (and she knows my work better than anybody else). When you see the black Japanese Mizuno Classic baseball bat, you should think a) baseball ( imported from the United States) is the most popular sport in Japan, b) baseball bat can be used as weapon, c) in Tokyo many brothels have the text Japanese only at their door, d) the text is written with a font inspired by the runic alphabet, e) runic letters were used by Nazis (e.g. two sig runes in SS) and are used by Neo-Nazis, f) there is a Nazi party in Japan (nationalist ideology imported from Germany) - like everywhere else.