Spiegel has a photoessay depicting national European stereotypes as conceived by a Czech sculptor. The work was commissioned by the EU itself. An accompanying article explains what the sculpture is, how it came to be made and why it is controversial.
A new sculpture in Brussels, commissioned by the Czech Republic in honor of its stint as holder of the European Union presidency, has rankled some EU members. The artwork depicts countries using stereotypes, not all of them terribly flattering.
It’s no secret that the Czech Republic is one of the more euro-skeptic members of the European Union. The country’s president, Vaclav Klaus — who, as it happens, is the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency — called in 2005 for the bloc to be “scrapped” and was a vocal opponent of the Lisbon Treaty, which was rejected by Irish voters in 2008 before the Czech Republic had a chance could torpedo it. …
“It is preposterous, a disgrace,” Betina Joteva, press officer for Bulgaria’s permanent representation in Brussels told the euobserver Web site. “It is a humiliation for the Bulgarian nation and an offence to national dignity.”
Joteva has, perhaps, reason to be upset. Her country is depicted in the eight-ton sculpture as a Turkish toilet. Many speculated that the reference might be to the centuries Bulgaria spent under Turkish rule.
And that’s just for openers.
‘It’s not art!,’ goes the cry. But presumably Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ is. “It depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art’s “Awards in the Visual Arts” competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.”
Since art sometimes takes on a life of its own, maybe the safest course is to stay away from publicly funded, monumental pieces. Or else there’s no telling where things may go. Rodin originally intended The Thinker to “depict Dante in front of the Gates of Hell, pondering his great poem. (In the final sculpture, a miniature of the statue sits atop the gates, pondering the hellish fate of those beneath him.) The sculpture is nude, as Rodin wanted a heroic figure in the tradition of Michelangelo, to represent intellect as well as poetry.”
Since then, copies of The Thinker have been used to ornament museums, libraries, cemeteries, savings banks and less tasteful settings. Those who get there may eventually discover whether a copy has found its way to the gates to hell, as Rodin intended.
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32 Comments
1. Lifeofthemind:The Englishman’s definition of Hell, a place where the Comedians are Swedish, the Police are German, the Politicians are Italian and the language is Dutch.
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:05 pm 2. Michael Hoskins:Art is communication. It doesn’t have to say the same thing to everyone. Did the piece communicate?
And, of course, who cares? The EU is ever more ineffectual. It is even failing to manage the surrender of Europe to Islam.
I only hope that Britain remembers that no time in its history has any continental adventure been positive…which is clearly communicated by the artist.
FWIW (for what its worth) In the trade they are called Eastern Water Closets. Some models have the foot pads outside the bowl, others inside.
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:09 pm 3. Uncle Jefe:This ‘art’ has turned out to be a fraud…
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:12 pm 4. Doc99:No worries here … the Belgians always waffle.
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:24 pm 5. Peter Boston:Hurrah for Vaclav Klaus!
Nice to see somebody kicking a little dirt on the picnic napkins of the Eurp princes.
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:27 pm 6. Mongoose:What is the old joke?
When you die and go to Heaven, the British greet you, the French cook for you, the Italians entertain you and the Germans manage you itinerary.
and when you die and go to Hell, The French greet you, the British cook for you, the Germans entertain you and the Italians manage your itinerary.
Something like that. (Perhaps down there in the nether regions, the Czechs have a go at portraiture).
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:28 pm 7. Mike Sylwester:That assembly of sculptures is amusing. It’s worth every Euro that the EU paid for it while the Czech Republic is in charge.
I visit Lithuania every May with my wife, whose family still lives there. During that time, Europe has a European music competition which is kind of like American Idol. Every European country sends a singer or group of singers, and then they perform, and then people call in and vote, and so the competitors gradually are voted off until one winner remains.
The definition of Europe is very loose. The competing countries include Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaydzhian and even Israel.
You can’t vote for your own country, but people vote for neighboring or culturally similar countries. For example, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes tend to vote for each other. Russians and Ukrainians tend to vote for each other. And so on. Unfortunately, there is too much of such voting and not enough voting for the best acts, so the competition has been ruined.
The newer “European” countries take the competition much more seriously. For example, The English and the French are too jaded to bother to vote, but the Russians and Ukrainians vote with utmost enthusiasm.
This year, therefore, there will be some judges who will weight the votes more toward the real talent.
This talent show probably does much more to develop a sense of unity among Europeans than all the political lecturing that is done during the rest of the year.
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:35 pm 8. Mike Sylwester:Pierre Trudeau once said that Canada had the rare opportunity to adopt three different countries’ best qualities — American technology, British culture and French cooking.
Unfortunately, he continued, Canada ended up with American culture, British cooking and French technology.
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:38 pm 9. El Gordo:I´m not keen on modern art but I like this funny and vicious piece. Of course bureaucrats should not spend tax money to commission art like some new aristocracy. The more this piece upsets them the better.
Jan 14, 2009 - 2:48 pm 10. Roderick Reilly:I take sadistic pleasure in the discomfiture of EU-nuchs.
Jan 14, 2009 - 3:06 pm 11. Commentator:Soooo funny- thanks for the best laugh I’ve had in weeks. The Czechs have their heads screwed on straight.
Jan 14, 2009 - 3:20 pm 12. PA Cat:Another national stereotype joke about the ideal army: the ideal army has British officers, French uniforms, German engineering, American supplies, Russian manpower– and the Italians for enemies. (Yes, I know Julius Caesar is still churning in his grave).
Jan 14, 2009 - 3:25 pm 13. Steve Skubinna:‘It’s not art!,’ goes the cry.
But “art” is merely what is produced by artists, and if a government has handed over a check to an artist for a product, that product is, by definiton, art. And so I am quite happy to see bureaucrats and the PC whiners hoist by their own petard.
My objection to “Piss Christ” was that it was a taxpayer funded attack on religion (the First Amendment only working in one direction). Does anyone seriously think the brave Serrano would dare submerge a photo of Martin Luther King or Gandhi in urine? An image of Mohammed would have lead to his execution. So as always, the false bravery of the morally supine leads to an assault on Christianity, and endless self congratulatory pats on the back. Chuckles over Chardponnay at the fast one they pulled on the booboisie once again.
Enjoy your Turkish Toilets, Euroclowns. It matters little what you pay your state subsidized art hacks to produce, your eventual Muslim overlords will have it all scrapped as blasphemous anyway.
Jan 14, 2009 - 4:36 pm 14. peterike:@Steve: It matters little what you pay your state subsidized art hacks to produce, your eventual Muslim overlords will have it all scrapped as blasphemous anyway.
That’s true. The sad thing is that all the real art — minus anything produced in, say, the last 100 years — will go right along with it. If any elite Euro progressive types are, by some freak accident, reading this, I suggest you ponder the thought of a bonfire outside the Louvre. All the paintings are going up in smoke. Meanwhile, the sculpture is being tossed from the rooftops to great cheers. It will happen in time.
And yeah, it will be YOUR fault.
Jan 14, 2009 - 5:31 pm 15. NahnCee:Would love to see what the Czech artist would create to symbolize the 22 different countries of the Middle East.
Jan 14, 2009 - 7:41 pm 16. Mongoose:Betcha there’s be a riot or three.
peterike: The concert halls too — all those wonderful European Symphony orchestras gone.
Jan 14, 2009 - 7:56 pm 17. E. Nigma:Well, the way I heard it was….
In Heaven, the Germans are the mechanics, the British are the police, the French are the cooks, the Italians are waiters and the Swiss organize everything.
In Hell, the French are the mechanics, the Germans are the police, the British are the cooks, the Swiss are the waiters and the Italians run everything. Heh, as they say in Knoxville.
It is always good to remember that many episodes of the “Dobey Gillis Show” (featuring a pre-Gilligan’s Island Bob Denver as erstwhile beatnik Maynard G. Krebs) conclude with Dobey standing in front of a statue of “The Thinker” in the park, reasoning through his teen-age angst. Low culture, or was Dobey about to enter through the Gates of Hell, leaving his adolecscence behind? All this in the early ’60’s, before our consciousness was raised, of course. The later ’60’s were full of faux rage against “The Man” by the rising Boomer Generation (talkin’ ’bout my generation!), by the eternally immature that now seem to govern the academy of the US. I guess they are “The Man” now, huh?
Things could be a whole lot worse than the advocates of ‘Soft Power’ in Europe mincing about in angst over some faux-art sculpture from a country that was under the German and then the Russian boot for most of fifty years, from 1938 to 1991.
Tens of thousands are not disappearing into the Gulag every year, and the crematoriums of the Death Camps are not full of burning bodies. Thank God for small favors.
Bad art, soft power, phoney baloney criminal courts or… Death Camps and Gulags?
Perhaps we will all look back upon this era fondly, not knowing what exactly is to follow.
Jan 14, 2009 - 8:36 pm 18. Mongoose:E. N.: “Things could be a whole lot worse than the advocates of ‘Soft Power’ in Europe mincing about in angst over some faux-art sculpture”
Oh I imagine we have a pretty good notion of what is to come, just you wait…we will get there soon enough.
Perhaps it is a mistake to think that one reality substitutes for another — our elites’ vanity, irresponsibly, cowardice, obtuseness and truly lust for betrayal and treason are the foundations of the coming maelstrom, not an effete alternative to it. The coming disaster could well have been avoided altogether if they had their heads on straight and acted responsibly. I doubt if sudden and happy outbreaks of sobriety, probity and responsibility can avert the coming tragedy at this point. It is too late; events are in the saddle.
One struggles in vain for a historical precedent to our predicament. The best that I can come up with is the complacency, vanity and frivolity of the European aristocracy and “Haute Bourgeois” in the 40 or 50 years prior to the outbreak of WW1.
They too “minced” about the arts, though for rather more intelligent reasons, and they too were plagued by wayward academics, pundits and “intellectuals”. Sometimes it seems to me that we are duplicating all the rot and vices of Edwardian Britain one hundred years later, but this time around it is a grim little parody of those times. Michael Moore is hardly a reasonable substitute for G. B. Shaw.
But this precedent is not truly apt for we know so much more now then they did back then; we have the example of the whole ghastly twentieth century to guide us. Everyone should know better. Makes one wonder just what manner of men died on the all killing fields of the last century. Did we truly break our best upon them? Sure looks that way these days.
How historians will ponder out failure and stupidity centuries from now. Much head scratching, I’d bet.
As for the The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis, I think our situation is more like that of an alum of that show. We, like Gilligan, seem stuck on the island, and, try as we may, we cannot get off. (Funny how Maynard G. Krebs was a teenage beatnik wannabe, huh? Were they with the program way back when?)
We also are inflicted with the same sort of “human resource” issues too: Bad management, obtuse aristocrats, screwball academics, third rate celebrities and liberal bimbos.
I wish I would have payed more attention way back when. I ahd not realized back then just how prophetic that show was.
Jan 14, 2009 - 9:46 pm 19. Mongoose:truly lust= lust.
Jan 14, 2009 - 9:47 pm 20. Peter Boston:The best that I can come up with is the complacency, vanity and frivolity of the European aristocracy and “Haute Bourgeois” in the 40 or 50 years prior to the outbreak of WW1.
I’m in the same era. Maybe 50 years of so earlier than you. It looks like some vulgar form of Romanticism driving the Betters to educate/whip the little people and the noble savages into the proper shape.
I wish I had the juice to engineer a national movement to never again elect to public office any graduate of Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia. It would be the bloodless revolution we need to excoriate the intellectual rot that pervades our republic.
Jan 15, 2009 - 1:28 am 21. twobyfour:@ 20. Peter Boston
With exception of hard sciences people. But then, they usually have no interest in politics.
I’d add lawyers, in total, regardless the institution they come from. I know that it just those 95% that are giving a bad name to the rest, but sorry. No lawyers is explicit, irrevocable and a loophole firewalled.
Jan 15, 2009 - 1:58 am 22. Mongoose:Peter B: Well, if you think that the problem in the Academy is limited to the Ivy Leagues, you have another thought coming. These vices permeate the state schools too.
Jan 15, 2009 - 7:13 am 23. Anton:You got that right Mongoose, have you ever been to the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor? (also know as the University of Michigan) It makes my head hurt when I talk to my buddy who is the only Republican in the History Department. The crap that passes as education these days is staggering. Having a degree, in anything but hard science, from any Univesity should permanently disbar the receipient from office.
Jan 15, 2009 - 9:51 am 24. Mongoose:Anton: Hard science is taking its lumps too. Just look at climate studies.
Even Physics and Computer Science departments have their share of idiocy at present; neither let us forget the ruckus Summers caused up at Harvard for making what any reasonable person would call and obvious observation. PC faculty appointments and admission policies are taking their toll as well in Science and Engineering programs. So let us not kid ourselves about Science and Technology programs in the Academy.
Moreover, we should not somehow congratulate ourselves that the so called “Humanities” or the “Liberal Arts” are the chief roosts of these sorts shenanigans. There is such a thing as “The Humanities” and it is even more vital to our society than Science. Science, Technology and Engineering do not address that major issues of life; scientism is an intellectual and a moral error. Technology and Science are value neutral — otherwise they could not properly function. Certainly, they will not keep vouchsafe our human dignity, liberty or prosperity in and of themselves, or even as the leading disciplines among many. As Chesterton once remarked, “One does not ask one’s horse where one wants to go” (or something like that).
Let me add that, when properly taught, these curricula should by no means be “easy” or for for people somehow else gifted or serious than those who would pursue science or engineering curricula.
Of course, to have such curricula, one would have to accept the standards, canon, knowledge, theories, practices and spirit of the Western heritage. Avoiding (destroying?) all this is rather the point of the current Academy. Short of revolutionary mobs in the quadrangle, the only way to effect change may be litigation and legislation.
This is an extremely serious issue — one much more dire than this overblown and over-hyped “financial crisis” that the Left is using for political cover this season.
The growing intellectual mediocrity of America is one of the next bubbles to pop, and it will be a loud one indeed.
We can grouse about a socialist ascendancy all we want, but we must remember that in the end socialism is much too parasitical to succeed.
Given the state of competition in the world today, we have little room to maneuver.
The American people really need to wake up and figure out what the left is up too.
Jan 15, 2009 - 10:41 am 25. Mongoose:Knaves and fools all.
that major issues= the major issues
Jan 15, 2009 - 10:53 am 26. Political Junkie:Another, more comprehensive,version:
Heaven is where the Germans make the cars, the French make the food, the Swiss run the hotels, the British are the cops and the Italians are the lovers.
Hell is where the Germans are the cops, the British make the food, the French make the cars, the Italians run the hotels and the Swiss are the lovers.
Jan 15, 2009 - 2:02 pm 27. weSwinger:@20: Peter Boston. Welcome to my crusade against the Ivy League Nincompoops. The Ivy Leaguers have been among the leadership of this country for 200 years: the problem is that for the last 100, they seem to have decided that they are too good for the rest of us. They have turned into
cockroaches infesting universities, government and the media, doing their best to f**k up this country for the last 100 years. This latest generation has been finding new and even more odious allies for their mischief than their predecessors. Their predecessors at least were inheritors and respecters of Western Civ. Now the ILN’s get their thrills cuddling up to the stone age worshippers of the moon god and practitioners of the blood sacrifice.
If you read A. Shlaes “The Forgotten Man”, you’ll realize that the ILN’s shining hour was really the FDR administration. And that they were not just curious about comrade Stalin’s Soviet Union – he was their role model. Nixon tried to push back at them. Not too successfully. Reagan tried with a little better success. GWBush tried to be both an ILN and a westerner – but pretty much remained (I think) an ILN except wrt the GWOT.
Our only hope is in the grave – that this particularly odious ge- ge- ge- generation will die off and our children and grandchildren will wonder what all the fuss was about – and settle down to hate us and all of our works when our bills come due.
Jan 16, 2009 - 4:17 am 28. Steynian 309 « Free Canuckistan!:[...] EUTOPIAN Self parody: “Spiegel has a photoessay depicting national European stereotypes as conceived [...]
Jan 16, 2009 - 5:56 am 29. marymcl:Andre Serrano’s urine sample is *art* because it’s calculated to upset people (guaranteed publicity) and both he and his hosts know they are safe from reprisal. There’s no danger of Christians burning down the museum. Let him do the same with a Muslim artifact and see what happens. It’s like the Proposition 8 protesters in CA that went after the Mormons but left the black churches alone.
Anyway, you gotta love the Czechs – they just keep coming through on the right side of things
Jan 16, 2009 - 7:44 am 30. marymcl:Mongoose – The state of liberal arts is appalling yet I’ve come to believe the most important elections we hold are the ones for local school boards. Elementary schools are rapidly becoming little more than indoctrination centers for political correctness and the Church of Al Gore. I am constantly amazed at the stories I hear from the young mothers I work with. The other day I was having lunch with three co-workers, all with children still in school, and it came up in conversation that every one of them had been investigated for child abuse at the instigation of the local school district. Apparently the kids are asked if they’re ever punished at home and and if the answer is anything other than “time-out” the upshot for many is a surprise visit from one of these investigators. I can’t imagine having to put up with that. I lost my temper with teachers and administrators over considerably less when my own kids were in school. This is scary.
A bit off-topic. As long as Rodin was mentioned, though, I urge anyone with the opportunity to visit the Met in NY to go find Rodin’s “Burghers of Calais”, which is off by itself somewhere around the edges of the American wing. It’s a life-size bronze of half a dozen men about to set sail as hostages during the Hundred Years War. I’ve had the great good fortune in life to have seen two sculptures that seemed to live and breathe. One was Michelangelo’s Pieta, and this is the other.
Jan 16, 2009 - 8:33 am 31. Word to the wise:Marymcl: Yes, of course you are right about school boards — shocking story, btw.
About Rodin. Yes, know what you mean here. If you ever get to Paris check out the Rodin Museum there:
http://www.musee-rodin.fr/welcome.htm
Philly in the US does not have a bad Rodin collection either:
http://www.rodinmuseum.org/
Stick some late Brahms in your Ipod, sit down in the garden for a spell and take it all in.
Jan 16, 2009 - 7:01 pm 32. marymcl:Word to the wise – Thanks for the links, and the suggestion
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