Looks like the penny has finally been spent with The Times headline: David Cerny says hoax EU sculpture inspired by Monty Python. Yet another piece of European aggrandisement and misquoting by The Times, or is Cern being a little too modest? Surely the Czechs have enough right to celebrate their own absurd, surreal and avant garde history? Here’s Cery in his own words:
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.
Indeed.