MfD: David Černý is angry about the interview in the Saturday supplement

Prague - Artist David Černý, who caused a stir with his sculpture Entropa and its fictional creators, is angry about a fictitious interview in the Saturday supplement of Mladá fronta Dnes (MfD). Černý believes that newspapers should not act in this way, unlike artists. He writes this in today’s MfD. The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Robert Čásenský, stated that the editorial team wanted to test the artist's sense of humor and mystification, as he aimed to test Europe's sense of humor with his work.
    "You are not an artwork, you are a news daily," said the artist, who called the newspaper's editorial office from the USA on Saturday.
    Černý is bothered, for example, by one of his fictional responses in which the Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs, Alexandr Vondra, supposedly promised him more commissions if he apologizes for the mystification with Entropa.
    "It harms him more than it harms me, he would never say anything like that," declared Černý, who claims that all the quoted direct speech in the interview for the Saturday supplement MfD Weekend is completely untrue.
    The newspaper adopted a similar approach as the artist, who invented characters of supposed co-creators from twenty-six European countries. A journalist asked Černý several questions via telephone to create the impression of a real interview. However, the content of the interview published in the newspaper is fictional, even though some answers are based on what the artist actually said.
    At the end of the interview, there was a note that this is a combination of reality and fiction. Following the example of David Černý, a public apology is also included. In it, MfD apologized "to the government, the European Union, Bulgaria, and David Černý".
    The sculpture Entropa, in which Černý parodied stereotypes about the perceptions of European Union countries under the names of fictional national artists, was unveiled in Brussels two weeks ago. The artist subsequently apologized to the government and the real Danish artist whose name he used in his fictional list of artists. He later also had to cover a panel of Bulgaria, which protested against the depiction of its country as a Turkish toilet.
    The controversial sculpture inspired nine European artists, at the request of MfD, to draw how they see the Czech Republic. For example, cartoonist Tchavdar Nikolov from the Bulgarian newspaper Novinar used the motif of a light bulb in his work to draw attention to the energy company ČEZ, which entered Bulgaria a few years ago and, in his opinion, creates "a rather negative image" for the Czech Republic.