{"id":10139,"date":"2009-01-25T09:00:19","date_gmt":"2009-01-25T14:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=10139"},"modified":"2011-05-16T13:32:20","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T18:32:20","slug":"mercury-punkdster-strikes-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/mercury-punkdster-strikes-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercury, Punk’dster, Strikes Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Jan. 11, as Mercury turned retrograde, Czech concept artist David Cerny<\/a> punk’d the stodgy Council of the European Union. His joke? A 2,760-square-foot model kit-like sculpture that depicts the 27 EU countries with ironic, politically incorrect stereotypes: France is on strike; Sweden looks like an IKEA flat-pack; Britain is missing altogether. Bulgaria is a patchwork of Turkish squat toilets and Italy is covered in soccer players who look as if they’re masturbating with the help of soccer balls.<\/p>\n

The piece, sardonically entitled “Entropa<\/a>,” was commissioned to celebrate the temporary Czech EU presidency. Twenty-seven individual artists would illustrate the theme “Europe without barriers.”<\/p>\n

But Mercury the Trickster had other plans. The underfunded and over-ambitious EU plans inspired Cerny and his colleagues to secretly change the plan.<\/p>\n

To complete the postmodernist joke, Cerny’s team created a brochure, complete with 27 fictional artists and dense mock artist statements. Elena Jelebova, for example, is a Bulgarian whose toilets intend “to cause a scandal, especially at home,” with a “punk gesture, intentionally primitive and vulgar, fecally pubertal.”<\/p>\n

The hoax was revealed soon after it’s unveiling. “We knew the truth would come out,” said Cerny to the BBC<\/em>. “But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.” Bulgaria didn’t: it demanded the Turkish toilets be covered. But the rest of the European countries are — in good Mercury retrograde style — rethinking their assumptions about one another. Which is the point, says Cerny: “Self-reflection, critical thinking and the capacity to perceive oneself as well as the outside world with a sense of irony are the hallmarks of European thinking.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Jan. 11, as Mercury turned retrograde, Czech concept artist David Cerny punk’d the stodgy Council of the European Union. His joke? A 2,760-square-foot model kit-like sculpture that depicts the 27 EU countries with ironic, politically incorrect stereotypes: France is on strike; Sweden looks like an IKEA flat-pack; Britain is missing altogether. Bulgaria is a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,940,938,52,939,941,284,117],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10139"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}