The Gutter Art Critic

                November 1989. Prague. The Berlin Wall came down just a few short weeks prior and a few hundred students are marching from the top of Vysehrad hill toward Wenceslas Square. At some point the group is seen to diverge from its set path. The theory is that a plain clothes secret police officer had ingratiated himself in the front of the group and with the explicit order to lead the students into a narrow corridor where the police, suited up in riot gear, was waiting. Blindsighted, the students marched, believing that in a just a few hours they will be home in their beds after making their voices heard. What followed was a televised spectacle of violence as the riot police in white helmets corralled the crowd into a narrow pedestrian underpassage where each protester could be individually beaten in a kind of a medieval gauntlet. Busted heads and knocked out teeth. Dubbed the Velvet Revolution, the 1989 uprising against the oppressive government was anything but. It was pe

In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the preface to her book The Origins of Totalitarianism “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecendented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Never has our future been more unpredictable, n