The operations of this spring  -the solo showcase at Arco Madrid and my exhibition in Helsinki, both with Korjaamo Galleria - were a great success. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, radio, TV, interviews, talk shows, celebrity and visibility.

The funny thing in the art word is that the fame and money don't go hand in hand. I've sold less than I spent to produce the works for these events. Disappointment, low self-esteem, misery and poverty. We have always two different versions to tell about the same story. I'm not sure which narrative cling to.

Now I'm packing but not for a new artistic campaign but an excursion to the seaside. Tomorrow we'll drive 600km to Hondarribia at the border between the Basque Country and the French Republic. We'll vacation few days with Judas and his family. It will be fun in five languages - Judas speaks Basque to his daughter and English with his wife, who speaks Chinese with their daughter. Our family mixes Spanish and Finnish. The seven of us don't have any language in common. However we communicate, I wish that we don't speak about art or money.

Few years ago I applied twice to the doctoral program of my alma mater, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. I was rejected and gave up with the dreams of the highest level of education. I began to feel that maybe going back to school would be strenuous for my big ego. I don't need anybody to tell me what to read and how to write.

Unexpectedly, Pauli, who is PhD, said that now when I'm director of MuNA - Museum of No Art, the fictitious museum we are building inside Serlachius Museums I should be doctor like him. As the museum is imaginary, the doctorate can be fake too, the Serlachius boss reasoned. I thought it was just a joke but he ordered my PhD from a Hong Kong based company selling university degrees.

Mr. Don Brain (why on earth not Dr.?) answered to our questions:

Based on the confidential agreement with the universities, we are not able to release the name of the schools to you. However, we guarantee all of our degrees are legal, verifiable, recognized and accredited.  We are doing this to avoid a lot of potential employers and customers to check the qualification through us and we take confidentiality seriously.  I hope you can understand this. We will choose an English speaking university in the developed countries like USA, UK, Australia. We charge bachelor degree for USD$ 200, master degree for USD$ 250 and PhD for USD$ 290. If you want UK public universities, we have the following choice and we charge USD$ 4000 each.
University of Southampton
Middlesex University
Bath Spa University
Coventry University
Salford University
University of Hertfordshire

Now I'm Doctor of Philosophy in Art History from Univeristy of Southampton. I believed we were acquiring just printed paper but I received also instructions how to verify my degree directly from the University of Southampton. Is it possible that my doctorate is real? Can the world be so corrupt that a public university sells a PhD degree for 4000 dollars?

I think I'm not going to include this in my curriculum vitae but I begin to choose Dr. , not Mr anymore, when buying an airline ticket or a renting a car. And naturally in the publication of MuNA - Museum of No Art I'm called Dr. Sakkinen.

I like the doctoral certificate as an artwork. Now I'm planning to contact Mr. Brain and ordering 20 doctoral degrees from different universities and with different majors. I think they would make a charming show - maybe set in a gallery of a university.

Andy Warhol said that you can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.

Coca-Colonization has seduced the world with its ideographic values – freedom, happiness and the American Way of life. We know that president Obama drinks Coke but in the past Coke wasn’t black but very white. In 1940’s its competitor PepsiCo started  to promote their soft drink in African-American communities when most of the corporations feared backlash from conservative whites if they merely advertised in the black press. Coca-Cola Company opposed racial mixing both on the job and in society, writes Stephanie Capparell in the book Pepsi’s Challenge in 1940’s: The Color Barrier. Ku Klux Klan sabotaged Pepsi and terrorized its retailers.

I never consumed regularly cola drinks but last fall in Beirut I switched from beer to Pepsi. Alcohol was scarcely available in my Muslim neighborhood and Pepsi was sold everywhere. Only McDonald’s and Burger King serve Coke in Lebanon. I was going to gym trying to lose some weight and Pepsi Diet with its one calorie per can was a perfect company for protein rich shawarmas.

I started to collect the soft drink cans in the studio and modified them slightly cutting out the letter T from the word diet. I actually wanted to use a gun to shoot the letters out but Zena couldn’t get me one although she had said that everybody has a firearm in Lebanon as the civil war never really ended but just ceased transiently.

The militia men in the streets of Beirut drinkPepsi, never Coke. Coca-Cola opened a bottling factory in Israel in 1968 after a long controversy. As a result, the Arab League boycotted Coca-Cola until 1991. Maybe the Christian militias drank Coke when they were allied with the Zionist entity in the civil war. However, cola drinks have been part of the Middle Eastern conflict.

The Cola Wars refers to a campaign of mutually-targeted television advertisements and marketing campaigns since the 1980s between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Both hired singers and actors to promote their products. Do you remember Michael Jackson in the 1983 Pepsi’s TV ad? During the filming, his hair caught fire dangerously. All his hair was gone and there was smoke coming out of his head, told the pop stars hairdresser.

There was more fire between the brands in the times of the Cold War. Coke was established as the symbol of capitalism and the Free World  but Pepsi ventured to the other side of the iron curtain – it was introduced to the Soviet Union in 1972 and the agreement included exchange for importations of Stolichanya Vodka to the United States. Pepsi was the first capitalist product sold in the Communist super power.

Already in 1959, during the historical US national trade show in Moscow, Khrushchev tasted Pepsi. The press went insane with photographs of the Soviet leader enjoying American soft drink, and newspapers around the globe displayed headlines like Khrushchev wants to be more sociable. The slogan for Pepsi in those years was Be Sociable, Have a Pepsi!

I visited Leningrad in 1986 when I was ten years old and I can remember the presence of Pepsi, the only familiar brand around. It was the same year when Pepsi was the official sponsor of the Goodwill Games in Moscow and became the first Western firm to have placed advertisements on Soviet television. More importantly, it was also the year when Gorbachev announced perestroika. Pepsi and its relation to the Soviet system had turned it into an icon and the word Pepsi-stroika appeared as a pun.

In the 1989 song We Didn’t Start the Fire, Billy Joel lists events of the Cold War, finishing with the line Rock and Roll, Cola Wars, I can't take it anymore. Curiously, Joel had been the first American artist touring in Soviet Union in 1987. After the Cold War, Pepsi entered to the Israeli market but still it has conserved a reputation of being anti-imperialist compared with Coca-Cola Many Arabs think that Coca-Cola supports directly the government of Israel. Some Americans still see Pepsi as supporter of socialism.

Victor Pelevin's novel Generation P is a satire of contemporary Russia and the children of Marx, Pepsi and TV, who in fact chose Pepsi precisely the same way as their parents chose Brezhnev. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Coca-Cola was introduced to the Russian market. As it came to be associated with the new system, and Pepsi to the old, Coca-Cola rapidly took the biggest market share. Coca-Cola's dominance in Russia was confirmed with its sponsorship of the Winter Olympic Games held in Sochi.

Maybe Pepsi should take now advantage of the Neo Cold War? If I were PepsiCO’s CEO, I would ally with Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Two years ago Pepsi used the advertising slogan Change the game.

Now I can finally speak about the secret project that we've been preparing almost two years. Next June the new Serlachius Museum opens in Mänttä, Finland, and one of the inaugural shows is MuNA - Museum of no Art.

Pauli wanted me to do something about museums which is against my ideas of art. In my opinion, art should not be about art, art world or art institutions. Finally he convinced me and the result is a dystopic museum where only money and power matter. I feel that in many museums the core is not the art which is used just as a pretext for other kind of activities - which doesn't mean necessarily that those museum show bad art. This is why my museum is "no art" but has invited 12 great artists to do posters that are used for marketing purposes, not in an exhibition. We'll build the MuNA inside the Serlachius Museum and it will house a gift shop with MuNA branded items, nothing else. The posters are on the walls of the Serlachius but outside of the MuNA.

MuNA Museum of No Art

Director: Riiko Sakkinen
Chief Curator at Large: Charlotte York Goldenblatt

Architect: Nobuyuki Masaki

Board of Trustees: Patrick Bateman, Charles Montgomery Burns, Gordon Gekko, Lex Luthor, Scrooge McDuck, Cruella de Vil, Willy Wonka

Supporters: Cyberdyne Systems, Omni Consumer Products, Tyrell Corporation, Umbrella Corporation, Weyland-Yutani

Poster Artists:  Judas Arrieta, Nisrine Boukhari, Erika Harrsch, Herman van Ingelgem, Eemil Karila, Zena El Khalil, Jani Leinonen, Shunsuke Francois Nanjo, Rivane Neuenschwander, Erkka Nissinen, Katja Tukiainen, Abdul Vas

http://museumofnoart.org