Apologies for the gap in postings– and with so much going on!  An Oscar for Once, a turkey headed to Serbia, and a new series on the arts in Ireland in The Irish Times… it’s all heady stuff 😉

Last thing first: the recent series about the arts in The Irish Times has dealt over the past few weeks with the value of the arts and inclusion issues, drawing quotes from various figures working in Irish arts organisations. Yet the series has, to me, felt pretty unoriginal and written in ‘student essay’ mode… this discourse about the social value and instrumentality of the arts is one that has long been in the public domain, and is discussed with more sophistication and nuance elsewhere (see Demos, the Journal of Cultural Policy, or the research going on at the Centre for Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick, for starters). While the series perhaps offers a useful summary for the general reader, I was hoping for more critical insight than has been offered…

Meanwhile the flap over Eurovision and Dustin the Turkey continues…  I quite enjoyed Fintan O’Toole’s take over the weekend:

A culture that was genuinely smart wouldn’t be so uptight about the terminally uncool. It might recognise that when there’s Arvo Pärt in Drogheda two weekends ago and a book club festival in Ennis today, serious art is hardly under siege. But the persistent need to sneer at Daniel O’Donnell or make a feck of the Eurovision exposes the anxiety within the clever, clued-in, media-saturated world.

(speaking of which, buzz about Arvo Pärt was amazing, and I’m sorry to have missed it.) The turkey metaphor is, indeed, too rich a field to go unplundered… and I’m disappointed as well, as an avid fan (no irony required) of the Eurovision. Take away the Baudrillard, thank you very much, but you’ll have to pry the ABBA albums out of my cold, dead hands…