Entropa: Vorsprung durch Pastiche

It's an outrage! How dare someone take the EU's money (apparently €350k of it) to commission works commemorating the culture of each of the 27 member states and use it to ridicule all of them? Public money should be given to Real Art! This collection of puerile stereotypes is degenerate!
I've always suspected the Czechs of being that rare beast, another nationality in Europe besides the British endowed with a profound sense of the absurd and a real understanding of the function of satire. So it's quite appropriate, regardless of the fact that it happened without their official intent, that the first cultural contribution of their EU presidency is serial provocateur David Černý's fake-up map symbolising the union in all its diversity.
Admittedly, the range of satire ranges only from the broad and tired (Sweden in an IKEA flat-pack, Romania as a Dracula theme park) to the seemingly earnestly political yet far too simplistic (Greece on fire, the Netherlands drowned except for minarets rising from the sea). Does this then mean that Entropa has failed as art, because it has failed as satire? Not in the least, and to react to Černý's work on this level misses the point by a country mile. How he must have fought to suppress his sniggers of delight while apologising to the Bulgarians for depicting their country as a urinal. Entropa is above all an attack on the inherent humourlessness of the fragile European quest for a united identity, requiring 27 trumpets to be blown equally loudly, and while one of the newest and least self-secure states may be a soft target to bait like this, it did guarantee the sought-for outrage. And perhaps a rather frightening response, in that across Europe, the reaction was widely as politically correctly staid and condemning as you might expect in the United States: no group shall be made fun of and the state is sacred. Hardly enticing as a glimpse of where we're headed.
In the meanwhile, Černý, who explicitly places himself in the Borat school of piss-taking (I urge you to read the expository PDF on Entropa at the bottom of the Czech presidency's official homepage) and has a fair bit of previous, painting Soviet tanks pink and spoofing Damien Hirst inter alia, can pat himself on the back for a job well done. At least the piece is still there: all hope is not lost.