Better than Airfix: Černý comedy and British art-ignorance
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily have equated artists with comedy genius. Rarely, for instance, do I leave a gallery in hysterics. Then again, rarely do I leave a gallery. And although I’m sure that some art is funny, one of the unfortunate by-products of being horrifically art-ignorant (along with getting easily bored) is that I don’t understand it.
But I do understand this (I’m not going to say this Guardian slide-show didn’t help) , and I flipping love it:
Is it an Airfix? No!
This is not, despite first appearances, a giant Airfix model, still in packaging. Nor is it one of those weird Lewis Hamilton-Santander adverts that I never, again, quite understood. This, my friends, is a whopping great piece of art called Entropa outside the European Council headquarters that takes the piss out of the EU’s member states.
A good question, at this point, is how a whopping great piece of art that takes the piss out of EU member states ended up outside the European Council? I imagine many Brussels-based officials are asking themselves the same question.
The answer is David Černý - a comedy genius Czech artist of eight tonne proportions, who not only breaks my stereotypes, but also managed to con pretty much the whole of the European Union. The official mosaic of the Czech six-month presidency was supposed to be created by 27 artists – one from each member state – which Černý, when asked, promptly made up. Not only is he a comedy genius, but a liar too! He gets better and better.
But what I love most about this is that few media eyebrows were raised before today. (Bruno Waterfield was one of the first, yesterday at 2pm.) And yet, the mosaic (for this is apparently what it is. Heaven knows why) was unveiled on Monday…
Any particular reason that the media didn’t give many column inches to, for instance, a sunken Netherlands, a masturbating Slovenia, or Russia being covered in Lithuanian wee? Oh, or missing Britain (just for laughs, look at this Guardian bungle). In the centre of Euroland? Urm, yes. Turns out that I wasn’t the only one that doesn’t understand art – no one else does either. It just takes two days and a public admission to force them to admit it.
