Politics

Artwork Worthy of the E.U.

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A new sculpture installed this past week in Brussels at the headquarters of the European Council, according to the New York Times, was meant to "symbolize the glory of a unified Europe by reflecting something special about each country in the European Union." Well, the sculpture, Entropa, does indeed depict "something special" about each E.U. member state.

As the Times reports:

Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a "for sale" sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.

France? On strike.

The 172-square-foot, eight-ton installation, titled "Entropa," consists of a sort of puzzle formed by the geographical shapes of European countries.

Enjoy some of the close ups below:

Truly a masterpiece worthy of one of most humorless, intrusive, convoluted governance systems ever devised. To call the E.U. bureaucracy "Byzantine" would be a slur on that defunct empire. 

Whole Times article here