Tag: Art

A4 Sounds: Who Is the Left Wing Art Collective Sucking Up Art Subsidies?

You’d be forgiven for overlooking A4 Sounds’s art studio, situated just before the Mater Hospital in the bosom of Dublin’s north-inner city. Ensconced firmly in O’Casey country just off Dorset street, the gallery and workspace has been catering for a...

/ 17/07/2021

Why does it Matter that the Nativity Scene at the Vatican is Ugly?

In the spirit of a modern artist, the Vatican’s nativity scene might turn to the traditional defense of those who seek to defend the ugly, ‘I say it’s art, who’s to say it’s not art?’. In doing so, one is...

/ 24/12/2020

The Terrible Beauty of Pop Culture

The very first RTE television broadcast was transmitted on New Year's Eve 1961, and the first speaker was President Eamon De Valera. He expressed considerable foreboding regarding the new medium: "I must admit that sometimes when I think of television...

The Decline of Poetry

In 2016, the organisers of the Rose of Tralee announced that contestants would no longer be allowed to recite a poem as their onstage party piece. The explanation was that poetry was “slowing down the flow of the show”. The...

Central Bank Wages War on Dublin’s Cityscape

A relative oasis of tranquillity, Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance commemorates Ireland’s patriotic dead and provides some uplift in a benighted north inner city. Even if one has to step over half a dozen heroin addicts on the way there, through...

/ 08/09/2019

Art Review: Seasons End: More Than Suitcases

What is art? Some art is used to evoke a sense of aesthetic pleasure in the viewer, whilst other pieces are created to do almost the exact opposite, perhaps to show them another side of the world. The exhibition Seasons...

/ 20/03/2018

The Little Mermaid is already feminist

The author Louise O’Neill is to release what is being described as a ‘feminist retelling’ of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. “Fairy tales have a dubious record when it comes to representations of women,” Lauren Fortune, editorial director for...

/ 15/09/2017