Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Bulgaria is a toilet, Romania is a Dracula theme-park and France is a country on strike. The Netherlands is a series of minarets submerged by a flood, Germany is a network of motorways vaguely resembling a swastika and Denmark is a collection of Lego blocks — "put together in such a way as to recall the infamous caricature depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban." Welcome to "Entropa," by Czech artist David Cerny, a gigantic multi-part sculpture in the atrium of the Justus Lipsius builiding of the EU Council in Brussels.

Grotesque hyperbole or grotesque reality? An absurdist or a realist view of the EU? Cerny would like to know "if Europe is able to laugh at itself". Entropa includes a brochure introducing each non-existent national "artist," including their past works, explanations of their contributions to Entropa and links to fake web sites. Very funny! "What do we really know about Europe?" Cerny asked. "We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them." But now, everyone's saying sorry. Cech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra says: "I apologise to Bulgaria and its government if it feels offended." So much for the European tradition of satire that gave us Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and Monty Python. Imagine the outcry if someone said the Bush satire industry should say sorry for offending people. We in Entropa deserve a laugh, too.