Since returning from travel in Central Europe and reminiscing on my David ÄŒerný sculpture hunt, I’ve been thinking a lot about the complexity of looking at (broadly categorized) anti-communist (and I’m not talking about propaganda here) art through the eyes of a remorseful (but definitely not repentant) capitalist.

Money is a good thing. Free markets are a wonderful thing. David ÄŒerný and others sharing his ethos remind us of this with their work as mouthpiece for a region engaging the capitalist’s life relatively recently.

For the train from Prague to Krakow, I got a hold of the most recent Umelec, an international art and culture publication, and found that the editorial by Ivan Mecl was addressing something in the neighborhood of this aforementioned complexity. He begins,

The European Union was not created out of regional cultural interest but rather to support free, cross-border investment. If you have a full wallet or a credit card, then you are an investment. This is a given concerning EU residents, and therefore they can travel where they want. We don’t want poor people, and thus there’s an iron curtain at the eastern border of the Union. It’s just they don’t call it that. It’s such an ugly word.

Nation-states are getting poorer, companies richer and there’s nothing essentially wrong with that. It’s immaterial who’s getting rich as long as enrichment is the general principle for functioning’¦multinational companies take on the role of cultural administrator and financier’¦They are often criticized for not acting consistently and democratically like State-run institutions. But they cannot and do not want to’¦they are much more transparent than their cousins in the State sector’¦In Eastern Europe only these new private institutions are willing to pay their employees well.

Mecl weaves on for another three-quarters of a page, and the piece is about as cohesive as my posts tend to be, but the lifeline he diagrams between capitalism and art is fascinating. He takes a swift plummet, with second-person reader on board, with his exploration of the not-so-free freedoms afforded by the rapid growth of the private sector, including hefty mortgages and SUVs. It, he says, ‘œlooks more and more like an invasion tank than a civilian car. This is the design of safety. Its weight is a metaphor for quality.’

So in the same week, I got a Facebook request to join the ‘œBoycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ group and about my 4-millionth email stock tip to ‘œstart investing in China now!’ This was complicated even further when at the Museum of Cartoon Art and Caricature in Warsaw, I came across a wonderful drawing of an Olympic athlete depicted as the bearer of world peace. It struck me that we’ve got our guns (once again) pointed in the wrong direction. I’m not getting any requests to join a ‘œBoycott Chinese Stocks’ group (nor am I going to take the time to start one), but instead encouraging the failure of one of the only peaceful successes that we as humans united ever achieve. So, yeah, I opted for the Facebook group anyway.

Overall, the trip was a great reminder that capitalism is a beautiful thing. However misappropriated or casualty-causing it ends up being, depends upon our everyday decisions in each of our micro free markets.

Is capitalist remorse getting you down? Well, it may be currently severely abused, but the global narrative isn’t going to be destroyed at this point. It could still be subverted. If you want a symbolic pick-me-up regarding the potential of the current empire (or at least a chance to compare it to alternatives), here’s a very brief list of possible reminders:

Watch the film The Party and the Guests (Jan Nemec, 1966).

Check out Cuban lesbian rappers, Las Krudas.

Read Aristotle’s The Topics.

Buy whatever you want or sell whatever you want today.