Don’t kiss the world goodbye!

Unleash all the furies of hell on the fucker!

Like Sophie did.

Sophie?

Yes, Sophie Calle, the French artist who has brought grudge-fucking to a high art and become the hit of this year’s Venice Biennale — sort of a Cannes Film Festival for the art world and one of the most competitive venues in Europe for the bright and the new.

When Ms. Calle’s boyfriend emailed her a “Dear Jane” letter, she replied by setting 107 raving women on his ass — Furies, indeed — installing the entire “work” in a pavilion at the Biennale.

Reports the Washington Post’s sharp-eyed and shaper-tongued Blake Gopnik:

The revenge Calle visited on [the wayward boyfriend] is now filling the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale, wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

Our guy — the artist has kindly identified him only as “X” — dumped Calle by writing her an arrogant, self-absorbed, self-pitying missive. He used the old line that he was leaving Calle for her own good. He’d found himself eyeing other women again and didn’t want to have to break his promise not to cheat on her. All of which, he implied, hurt him more than it hurt her.

If that wasn’t true then, it is now.

Sophie Calle [left], who was born in Paris in 1953, is one of the toughest artists on the planet … So it’s no surprise that, rather than indulging in weepy despair — as if – Calle chose to turn her latest pain and anger into art. She shared the cad’s communique with 107 other women and let them have a go at it.

The piece is titled “Take Care of Yourself,” after the writer’s closing words, and Calle and her comrades have certainly taken care of him.

Calle sent a printout to a copy editor, who tore apart the jilter’s diction and grammar. The text, marked up by the editor in black pen and four highlighter colors, is blown up to fill a giant patch of wall in the pavilion, alongside Calle’s photographic portrait of the grammarian…

And there are the comments of a forensic psychiatrist, who diagnoses the words as revealing “a true, twisted manipulator, psychologically dangerous and/or a great writer. To be avoided. Categorically.” (The originals are mostly in French, but there were translations available in the pavilion in English and Italian.)

Calle gets female experts to translate the note into Latin, Braille, Morse code, bar code and shorthand, all presented huge on the pavilion wall. A female journalist writes it up as the briefest wire story; a puzzle writer turns it into a crossword; a grade-school teacher reworks it as a fairy tale with a sad ending; a pair of Talmudic scholars put it through the most rigorous scriptural analysis.

In a room of ever-changing videos, Calle has the e-mail read and commented on by the great French actress Jeanne Moreau, by British stars Miranda Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave, by pop singers Peaches and Feist. It gets “interpreted” by a clown and a puppeteer. It’s sung out by an opera diva and danced to as a tango, a ballet and tough punk rock…

My favorite video shows a competitive markswoman whose response to the e-mail was to shoot it up. She’s shown on a firing range, kitted up with the latest high-tech clothes and a gleaming rifle custom-machined just for her hands. The gun barrel barely twitches as she blows the note away.

This is jilted woman as remorseless killing machine.

Lucky for X that Calle is only an artist.

One can’t help but think of another French artist, the flamboyant Kitsch master William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who saw the situation from the cad’s point of view, we think, in his stark (for him) but supportive Remorse of Orestes (left).

Orestes’ situation was different, of course — he had murdered his mother, not driven a woman to suicide, as his Shakespearean update, Hamlet, would do. Still sympathy was clearly with the fallen male, the soul murderer of women.

No more. Big Time no more.

Our reporter does a neat job of explaining why. For one thing, the artist here is a woman.

So what’s this all about, then, as art?

Gender difference and female solidarity, obviously. The boyfriend’s face, the usual stuff of love-affair art, is missing from this installation. Instead, we get a fabulous composite portrait of a community of women, mostly skilled professionals, brought together by the actions of one loser guy. The weepy sentiment that has traditionally been seen as women’s artistic territory is replaced by hard-nosed social analysis.

The piece is also deliberately comic. Laughter was the almost universal response of the pavilion’s visitors — far more women than men, at one count — and that made the piece, for all its sad foundation, feel as cathartic as Caravaggio’s violence.

By tending toward comedy, Calle also fights against the melodramatic cliches that art is still surrounded by — cliches of the tortured artist, the lost romantic soul, the aesthetic spirit who feels more deeply than all others and often speaks in tongues.

In this piece, Calle is more torturer than tortured, more glib Don Rickles than babbling Ophelia

Our favorite bit of retribution, though, came from “a certain Mme. Aliette Eicher, comtesse de Toggenburg, an etiquette consultant who teaches ‘savoir-vivre.’ She pointed out, without sparing any bile, all the ways in which Monsieur X broke the basic code of love that any true ‘man of the world’ would follow.”

The countess then rewrote the note in a style befitting a real gentleman: Handwritten with a fountain pen. On rag paper bearing a coat of arms:

Wouldn’t you love that embroidered on a pillow?