Posts Tagged Greece

News Art – THE ANONYMOUS ARTIST ON CAKE CLUB/EU BAILOUT PACKAGES

Right. In recent months I was offered membership of the Cake Club at work. Every Wednesday a different member brings a cake to work. Then we eat it. Anyone can join if they have been invited and if they supply a cake when it is their turn.

I was excited to join, partly for the weekly sugar surprise and partly because the club seemed straight forward and we had recently had turbulent leadership battles and factional in-fighting in the Vending Machine Club.

However, upon joining cake club, I did hesitate for a TINY, TINY moment, at the thought of whether I could afford to buy a cake every couple of months. But I only hesitated for a MOMENT.

Despite this the Anonymous Artist seems to have felt it necessary to influence European politics to teach me a lesson through art!!

You can imagine my ire when I discovered that Slovakia was going through almost exactly the same dilemma as I had gone through. Around the same time in June, Slovakia was dragging its feet over signing up to a large safety net for EU states that fell upon financial difficulty.

As the EU’s poorest and a relatively new member it was understandably unexcited at the thought of contributing towards a very large and mandatory bailout fund.

Yes, there was a part of me that felt that as a new member of cake club who hadn’t indulged in any cakes yet, I should be allowed to have a few weeks of cake before I was expected to buy one. I had also only just come back to full time shifts so was very low on funds.

On the other hand, Cake Club was a good backup/bailout if you got to a Wednesday and had forgotten to pack a lunch (much like Greece forgot to implement financial reform, leading to their need for bailout/cake).

However I kept all these concerns (that were being mirrored in Slovakia’s hesitations) to myself so HOW had the Anonymous Artist known?

This was most worrying. And, not AS worrying but still quite intriguing; how had the Anonymous Artist managed to gain such an influential role in Slovakian and Eurozone politics so quickly upon learning of my cake club reservations?

Either way the Anonymous Artist has gone too far with their art, in my opinion. And it has got worse…

Since Slovakia’s hesitation Hungary has since been denied a similar rescue plan from the EU and IMF. This was clearly engineered by the Anonymous Artist as a VERY POOR word pun on the words Hungary and hungry in relation to cake (WORDPLAY ALERT!).

The Artist is not just inspiring an audience anymore, they are messing with international politics and the economic prosperity of entire countries!

And above all they are IGNORING the fact that after hesitating for only a moment, I not only bought my first cake for cake club but I bought the  above one that was double the price of all others. This was because it could be made to amusingly spell ‘enchante’ which makes it FANCY and FRENCH! I bet Nicholas Sarkozy would be quite happy to negotiate further with Slovakia over austerity measurements being required of Greece if he saw that!

NB: I did consider at first the chance that the Anonymous Artist was influencing the Cake Club to make a statement about EU diplomacy, rather than vice versa… however I am quite sure that the Cake Club could not be infiltrated and its joining policies  influenced so easily and quickly.

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5TH May – IS GREECE THE CANARY IN THE COALMINE FOR EU?

The EU and IMF are hammering out a deal to bail out the struggling Greek economy. Europe’s more fiscally prudent countries have been reluctant to lend to the spendthrift Greeks, but analysts warn that failure to act now could destabilise the euro. – The Guardian

ARTWORK: Canary in the four bedroom flat

Several months ago, our flatmate was always falling asleep the moment she sat down. We all would laugh at her hilarious narcolepsy. Then one day I smelt gas coming from our old and poorly-installed boiler.

We had a bad gas leak and had to call the National Gas Emergency Line.

Was it possible that our dear flatmate Katie’s constant, light comas had been her poor, weak body trying to warn us of the danger lurking in our shoddy house? Was her body also trying to warn us, through artful metaphor, of the impending Greek debt crisis, which was to hit just a month later, and itself hint at a poisonous sovereign debt time bomb for the EU as a whole, stemming from the financial crisis of 2008?

It seems likely.

I have made a very simple sculpture in tribute to the months of fatigue that Katie endured to try to help her housemates and Europe. This is an impression of the new boiler our landlord very reluctantly installed that eventually meant we finally had pressure in our shower head and I wasn’t kept awake all night by the boiler clanging when anyone flushed the toilet.

I pray for a similar outcome for the EU economy.

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