After Greece’s not-so-recent credit downgrade from CCC to CC, the Greek economy has been in money madness. After Apple surpassed the entire nation in net worth, Greek President Karolos Papoulias called for a “war-time mobilization” to get the country back on track. Down 150 billion euros in tribute money, the Greek have been employing all sorts of tactics to keep their sneeze-residue shaped country afloat. Unfortunately, even after switching lamb gyros for Spam gyros and Spam gyros for starvation, the Greek government is still coming up short. Now, having milked all it could out of the Sparta meme, Greece has turned to its last resort: abstract art.
This movement, spearheaded by the revolutionary artist Megara Hephaeseidon, has reduced Greek unemployment to a jaw-dropping 0% as the entire population has become part of the abstract art industry. The government mandated project, christened “Even Your Three-Year-Old Can Do It,” has raised 800 million Euros, mostly due to Hephaeseidon’s chef d’oeuvre, Cocoon of Entropy. A realist sculpture consisting of a single duct tape sphere having been rolled around in glitter, Cocoon of Entropy is, as Greek experts acclaim, “a spontaneous tribute to both flamboyant homosexuality and Apollo.” Indeed, much of Greece’s new leading industry seems to be dedicated to the deities. For example, four-year-old Percy Ähs’ chef d’oeuvre, Nyx in Night, a seemingly accidental dark smear on a piece of loose leaf paper, is a tasteful representation of Nyx, the Greek Goddess of Night, “optimistically miniaturized to reflect the increasingly small power of the Shadows.” To find more about this divinely inspired trend, reporters got in touch with Greek art appraiser Raleigh Steacraken, who gave an exclusive 980 minute long interview on the finer artistic aspects of “Even Your Three-Year-Old Can Do It.”
“See?” explained Steacraken, pointing to a paint drop on Hephaeseidon’s new collage, Olympian Symphony, “This is a sun, seen from really far away, or the heart of a bug, seen up close. The purposeful ambiguity Hephaeseidon works in with this draws a phenomenally powerful parallel between the sun and bug hearts. Both are life sustaining, but they are on distantly different levels of magnitude and power. And yet, they are here, shockingly, the same.” This illuminating and entirely uncontrived analysis of Olympian Symphony continued for 16 hours, at which point our reporter collapsed from exhaustion and lack of faith in humanity.
During the 16 hour interview, a mind-blowing 20 million more Greek abstract art masterpieces were created. “Even Your Three-Year-Old Can Do It” is actually running out of museum space to store its pieces. Even after demolishing the 3400-year-old Athens ruins, the Greek government is struggling to make room for more of the project’s bent coat-hangers, coffee stains, and poorly folded paper airplanes. Despite its growing pains, however, the Greek abstract art industry is flourishing, having raised almost a billion Euros through eBay auctions. And though Greece still has a long way to go, primarily because all of Greece’s citizens still don’t pay their taxes and thus none of these profits actually reach the government, “Even Your Three-Year-Old Can Do It,” has shown the world that when it comes to getting money with absolutely no training or skills, abstract art is not the wrong way to go.
-KS ’15