Zert (aka The Joke)

This is Entropa, or the European puzzle, the work of Czech artist David Cerny (check out the website, please please), which pokes fun at national stereotypes and was commissioned by the Czech government to be placed in the middle of an EU building at the start of the Czech Presidency. It has already stirred up criticism, particularly from Bulgaria, depicted as a mosaic of Turkish toilets. Cerny said he would recruit 27 sculptors from each country, but instead created everything himself without telling the Czech government. He also came up with 27 names of artists quoted in a fake brochure (which is in all its irony part of the whole work). Here is an abstract of his official statement explaining his motivation:

Grotesque hyperbole and mystification belongs among the trademarks of Czech culture and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art. The images of individual parts of Entropa use artistic techniques often characterised by provocation. The piece thus also lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space. We believe that the environment of Brussels is capable of ironic self-reflection, we believe in the sense of humour of European nations and their representatives.

My two cents: I find Entropa really funny, and the fact that it encapsulates national stereotypes succinctly makes it good symbolic material. My favourite piece of the puzzle has Polish monks raising the gay flag a la Iwo Jima. That said, ironic self-reflection itself is not art no matter what Mr. Cerny says; it is deconstructing meta-art, which is not particularly of my taste. Or, perhaps, it is the lowest common denominator in art, oddly resembling the lowest common denominator in foreign policy reached by EU ministers in the present crisis (or in any crisis for that matter). It is the perfect artistic counterpart to the hodge-podge that is the "united Europe" and, in that sense, it is honest and nobody should be complaining about it.