Apologies for art

(corrected and updated)

For a while, the Czech EU presidency's shares were way up. Each country in an installation in honour of the new president gets a little space on a map of Europe where "stereotypes are demolished".

Estonia's entry incidentally is pretty clever -- a deconstructed hammer and sickle made of power tools. Clearly a reference by artist Sirje Sukmit to the building boom and economic miracle, which is..um, over for now, but, well...



Took me a little while to get it, but OK.

Other countries' artists interpreted the assignment extremely differently. (The other Baltics were simply inscrutable. Lithuania's sent a cartoon of five guys peeing into...is that Belarus?



Sorry, Belarus. Man, it's good they aren't included in the installation.

Latvia sent a sketch of mountains. I don't know what the hell it means, but I do wish there were mountains in the Baltics, too.)

Now the Czech artist responsible for curating "Entropa" has had to apologized for art, because some of the countries really didn't like what their own artists came up with, and not just the countries that were shown getting peed on.

I've noticed there's a lot of this going on: someone will do something a bit scandalous, which he or she knows perfectly well will be scandalous, and then the predictable people get all flustered instead of being amused, and then in the end the jester is humiliated by having to unwad other people's knickers, which procedure the people whose knickers are in a wad would obviously be best-poised to do themselves.

"Entropa" really isn't that incendiary. There's a fine line between sending up a stereotype and simply perpetuating it. Romania depicted as a vampire theme park -- that's the best they could come up with? I don't know anything else about Romania. I guess neither do the Romanians. Anyway, kind of makes me want to go there, true or not. So in that sense it seems like a case of Boratitis, which no doubt increased interest in Kazakhstan.

On the other hand Poland (priests in cassocks hoisting a rainbow flag Iwo Jima style) is pretty funny, unless you're a priest.

The Estonians had something subversive at the most recent Venice Biennale -- a gas pipeline between the German and Russian pavilions. (Too bad Venice doesn't get the attention that Eurovsion does.) Luckily that was a hip event, and I guess the political comment didn't ruffle too many feathers. But the Czech event was for an official EU installation, and the Czech government already has a reputation for thumbing its nose at the EU. But again, what do you expect? Reading about Cerny's past work (I'm even reluctant to type some of the titles here), it seems a bit like Bush commissioning his presidential portrait from Mapplethorpe (which I'd incidentally like to see, were it possible). Did you really expect something polite?

Finally, this quote from CNN was hilarious, at least out of context: "Cerny, and his main collaborators Kristof Kintera and Tomas Pospiszyl apologized to Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek and other government ministers Tuesday, according to a statement on the artist's Web site, for "not having informed them about what is true and for having misled them."

Do I have to inform my officials about what is true? Goodness, I'm still trying to figure out what is true myself. I thought the officials knew.

Since apologies are all the rage, might as well before anyone stumbles across what I've written... I apologize for mistaking Zatlers for Bowie -- his hair is much cooler. If you had a good buzz going, I'm sorry for posting the entry entitled "Sobering". And I'm sorry for saying that Bush was just a bum and a leecher -- I don't know where on earth I got that impression. I'm sorry for suggesting that Israel should have been a little more careful and that they might have evacuated 333 children before attacking. Unless, of course, by showing that it can drive the Gazans into the sea, Israel is engaged in a bit of conceptual art itself in pointing up its own history. Then it should apologize.