The Bucurenci "Brand"

Lately, many Romanians took advantage of the dismal talented-people-to-TV-stations ratio and became overnight sensations. If you thought Paris Hilton was a silly occurrence on the global celebrity map, wait till you see and understand the Becali anomaly or the "Iri and Moni" show on the Romanian celebrities arena.

But these unsavory characters have been widely discussed. There are other, more insidious examples of sudden stardom that deserve a critical stance. Take Dragos Bucurenci, a young Romanian metrosexual on the rise who got to "defend" Mircea Eliade in the infamous "Great Romanians" TV contest.

In what might appear to some as a fit of painful clarity, Mr. Bucurenci introduces himself on his blog as "an unsympathetic product of consumer society". Alas, he's not lucid there, he's just playful. In a recent interview he defines himself as "one of the best built brands of the young cultural market in Romania". Is he cynical, or what! Happily and clinically cynical.

Granted, he has been working/partying hard and has committed quite a slew of sinful sacrifices to achieve this commercially viable status. As a result, his CV plainly states the sorry state of his education: at 25, the man is a college dropout, period. Therefore, he managed somehow to position himself as some prodigy of contemporary culture without even going through the motions of acquiring the elementary skills needed for the role. And a Raymond Radiguet he is not, I assure you.

But all this philistine diploma stuff will be remedied in half a decade or so, some might argue, provided he doesn't drop out yet again. Dragos enrolled a few months ago in Art History studies. One may wonder when he has time for his curriculum, busy as he is publishing left and right, keeping up with all the cool stuff and preparing his weekly show, "Cultura libre". Well, in his case, "libre" of books and education, "Cultura libre of libris", so to speak. How does he juggle all this?

Very poorly, is the short answer. Because the Bucurenci brand currently stands for: a lame TV show, hastily written essays scattered in magazines and "trendy" publications, a really awful "novel", all coming at the price of a compromised academic start. Bucurenci's brand of culture is gleaned from extensive internet browsing, reading blogs, googling up a storm and wikipeding for the rest. When he's on his show, with a huge MacBook in front of him, with his lean figure clad in trendy clothing, he probably figures that this is good enough for his audience.

But to have a world famous scholar such as Mircea Eliade be advocated on national TV by a college dropout! What a bitter hoax indeed! Luckily, the documentary that introduced Eliade was professionally made by Andrei Morosanu (director) and a team of outstanding screenwriters. Bucurenci himself just vogued with some natural class in front of the cameras, but nobody denies his passably good looks here, just his insufficiently trained brains. During the open debate that followed, the man came up with the crushing proof of Eliade's superiority over his contender, Brancusi: the sheer number of Google results that the scholar's name elicits during a simple search! Ya-ba-da-ba-DOH!

On his most recent "Cultura libre" installment, DB brought in three buddies to discuss Web 2.0. (Mr. Bucurenci's "cultura" is "libre" of women as well, for some unfathomable reason -- only two women were invited to his show so far.) A lengthy babble ensued, making it obvious that these young stars "of the young cultural market" had spent zero time preparing for the show and were no experts on the topic to begin with. A poor excuse to hold up audiences at night, and bloggers everywhere didn't fail to notice.

Another appalling recent faux pas of Bucurenci was an article published in the Catavencu almanac, proudly re-posted on his own blog. There he took to belittling engineers, which our unlikely academic hero viewed as some kind of a pest that had befallen Romania during the last few decades. Let's get this straight: people who had spent five years in Engineering studies of all kinds, irrespective of their other interests and endeavors, were to blame for the sorry state of Romanian culture and for numerous faults at all levels of society. Again, coming from someone with no university degree, this showed the same shameless guts that has become a prerequisite of contemporary Romanian TV/cultural stardom. The worst part was that the article itself was very carelessly written. It was plain to see that the author had taken no writing classes of any kind and that the art of composition eluded him -- just like it had in his so-called "novel", published a while ago.

This "novel", "RealK" by its oh-so-cool name, is just an outpouring of words, a bloggy affair of no substance that some friends in the cultural arena endorsed (notably Florin Iaru, who may have paved the young "prodigy's" way to Romanian National TV stardom, incidentally). Check out DB's buddy Miron Ghiu (yes, the Web 2.0 guest) pitching the blog/book compulsively on a forum, quoting from it ecstatically. The "novel" soon littered the bookstore shelves all over the country and even, some say, became a bestseller, thanks to the gullibility of the young "internationally minded" Bucurenci fans. Many critics were soon to point out that "RealK" had no business with literature, but apparently to this day Dragos is slow to comprehend why. However, he did promise himself and the world that one day (before he is 40, to be more precise, which leaves him 15 years of thinking time, in my opinion, hardly enough) he will come up with an offering pertaining without a doubt to that art form.

Meanwhile, he's cashing in on the proceeds of his easily mustered fame, while "internationally minded young Romanians" who happen to fall for his style will get the idea that intellectual glory in today's world is much easier to attain than they originally may have envisaged. All it takes is some luck, a bit of charisma, friends in high places, and that's about it, even the otherwise easily available and ubiquitous college degree has become optional in today's Romania...

Such "internationally minded" Romanians would be well advised to keep only their minds "international" and otherwise maintain firm contact with Romanian ground. That's the ONLY place where they can aspire to intellectual success, even stardom while ignoring genuine education. Why, they'd only mirror their less cultured brothers, the "becalized" masses and they'd become their natural elites. Because that's where "Cultura Libre" and its strong "young cultural brand" are headed...