Return of the art dead

Oh you ungrateful readers who have surely come across this piece of paper by chance – this piece of sincerity and, at the same time, the weekend headache of the editors. You surely don’t know that editorials as such were invented in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians used the concept for the texts in which the hieroglyph-producing artisans, faced with the task of completing long and difficult inscriptions full of boasts and superficiality, made fun of their clients. Initially, these vicious statements were left on the inner side of the tombstones or sarcophagi and remained hidden for thousands of years. Yet since the invention of papyrus, and finally paper, and since pages can be turned, such editorials can be accessed by uninvited readers. An example is given by one of the oldest scrolls at the Library of Alexandria – namely Thovt’s treatise About the history of the third underworld and related heights – in which the writer added: „Thovt dictated this while he was drunk. I was there“. For including this comment the writer was crushed alive between two slowly turning millstones. If these were powered by the Nile, it must have been a really slow death.
Today we are under no threat of slow death, at best the threat of a quick collapse of the organism due to a lack of exercise, and therefore we are more and more courageous in writing the editorial. We would like all readers of our compilation of texts to read it, even if the editorial is no longer a hidden provocation producing a single hero – a hero, moreover, who knows that he will never see the fruits of his courage. And as I have now wasted a lot of time and energy in highlighting one of the subgenres of the magazine – which surely caught your attention only thanks to a few ugly pictures – now I’m telling you: buy more copies of this great magazine to find out what its creators really think; there is not much we can do about the authors of some of the articles as they will go over the same ground again and again. Here, as in any good magazine, you will learn how things really are: who actually wrote in a state of drunkenness and who just made it up.

01.01.2007