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.

Miliband: "War on Terror was Wrong"

In case anyone had any doubts whether the foreign policy of the UK is a mere copycat of State Department memos, Mr. Miliband, her Majesty's Foreign Secretary, declared "War on Terror" wrong in today's Guardian (as well as a speech at the Taj Mahal hotel, in Mumbay). This comes a day after Hillary Clinton's remark on the use of American "smart power". In other words, and as one of the comments put it, this warmer weather seems to have brought the toads out. What is depressing is that the same Labourites could have voiced this mild criticism like, what, 4-5 years ago? And not now, 5 days before the Obama inauguration and amidst the highly unpopular Israeli invasion in Gaza. The UK might have avoided complicity in illegal detention and rendition, torture, drafting of horrid terrorism laws etc. It might also have saved its soul.

Here is part of Mr. Miliband's depressingly correct analysis:

The idea of a "war on terror" gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The reality is that the motivations and identities of terrorist groups are disparate. Lashkar-e-Taiba has roots in Pakistan and says its cause is Kashmir. Hezbollah says it stands for resistance to occupation of the Golan Heights. The Shia and Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq have myriad demands. They are as diverse as the 1970s European movements of the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, and Eta. All used terrorism and sometimes they supported each other, but their causes were not unified and their cooperation was opportunistic. So it is today.

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.

Happy New Year! - Missile Tov!

Happy New Year! Relaxed after a much-needed break from everything and a couple of kilos heavier, I am back to Oxford and back on track with my work. Unfortunately, so is the Israeli army backed by the Israeli politicians and public opinion, all of whom are blatantly exploiting the momentary power void to reassert themselves in the Middle East. Unless we assume that Israel's leaders think that the Palestinians will flee Gaza and the West Bank altogether, the strategy is so self-defeating, so short-sighted that it might create the most callous, the most stupid humanitarian catastrophe the Middle East has seen in years. The best (or should I say self-evident) analysis I have read is from the Economist:

Taking Hamas down a peg is one thing. But even in the event of Israel “winning” in Gaza, a hundred years of war suggest that the Palestinians cannot be silenced by brute force. Hamas will survive, and with it that strain in Arab thinking which says that a Jewish state does not belong in the Middle East. To counter that view, Israel must show not only that it is too strong to be swept away but also that it is willing to give up the land—the West Bank, not just Gaza—where the promised Palestinian state must stand. Unless it starts doing that convincingly, at a minimum by freezing new settlement, it is Palestine’s zealots who will flourish and its peacemakers who will fall back into silence. All of Israel’s friends, including Barack Obama, should be telling it this.

As is often the case, Jon Stewart nails it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5IHcMlBuE