Another room in the Gallery of Matica srpska: Sculptophilia. The sculptures here do not stand about—they hold their poses, like street mimes. One has the distinct impression that if you looked away for a second they would shift position behind your back. The light does not so much fall on the marble as whisper to it. You come out hopelessly in love with sculpture.
Take the Mercury of Đorđe Jovanović (1938). He is not standing; he is in flight. He contains the whole idea of free trade: lightness, speed, and not a single official on his tail.
Which is a joke the god has been making at our expense for a very long time. Mercury is the patron of merchants and of thieves alike, and the Greeks who knew him as Hermes also planted him at the boundary stones—the one deity charged with marking the frontier and with getting across it. Every generation produces someone convinced that prosperity can be improved by making the crossing harder, and every generation is astonished when it cannot. The Corn Laws kept English bread expensive for thirty-one years in order to protect English landlords. The Smoot–Hawley tariff of 1930 set out to defend American jobs and helped turn a crash into a decade. Bastiat, watching the same performance in France, wrote a petition on behalf of the candlemakers demanding that the government block out the sun, since it was flooding the market with free light.
And the argument is never really about goods. What crosses the frontier with the merchant is the letter, the recipe, the argument, the rumour, the tune. Close the road to one and you close it to the rest. So one rather hopes the last word goes to Mercury—who has, after all, outlasted every customs officer who ever tried to detain him.
