Hard to tell art from reality at Kilkenny festival

Kilkenny's KCLR radio station reported that gardaí were investigating the discovery of animal hearts impaled on railings at three locations in the city.

A weary-sounding spokesman at the Garda station confirmed the grim news, said no one had been apprehended but noted: "It is Arts Week, you know."

While the "event" did not feature on the official programme, the local consensus was that the author of the prank was a "budding artist".

"I love the weather here," said a bubbly American jazz singer in the gardens of Kilkenny Castle. Her enthusiasm for the Irish summer was not shared by grumpy bystanders but Bernardine Mitchell found the "cool air" a relief after the stifling humidity of her native Atlanta.

She was one of hundreds of overseas performers who attended the first weekend of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, despite leaden grey skies and steady rain.

Deputy mayor Cllr Seán Ó hArgáin, shielded from the occasional downpour by a Louis Copeland-branded umbrella, performed a flurry of openings and local Green Party TD, Mary White, attended the festival's launch party at the mediaeval Rothe House.

With "d'arts crowd" safely installed behind locked doors for the opening event - readings by novelist Colm Tóibín and poet Eavan Boland - in the Protestant St Canice's Cathedral, the Kilkenny cats came out to play. Hackney minibuses disgorged platoons of pretty-in-pink "hens" on to John Street watched by welcoming parties of local youths dressed in black and amber hurling jerseys. It was hard to separate art from reality.

A refuse truck branded "Burnley Borough Council" trundled along narrow pedestrianised Kieran Street. A "performance spectacle" from England or an imaginative act of intercultural recycling by the local authority?

The rain continued on Saturday with large crowds roaming the city centre in search of amusement. There was no parade and precious little entertainment apart from "street theatre" by the overhyped Buí Bolg company whose performance in stale and tatty costumes failed to inspire much excitement among shoppers at Market Cross.

While the locals got on with weekend shopping, gaggles of mainly Italian, German and French tourists traipsed through damp, gloomy streets looking stunned and disoriented.

But some were made of sterner stuff. Australian Neville Gooding, visiting Ireland for the first time with his family from Brisbane, said: "This is what we expected [ the weather] to be like; it's nice for a change."

At the National Craft Gallery it was wall-to-wall "arts luvvies" for the opening of A Life in Colour - a retrospective of the work of Irish ceramicist John ffrench. He said he was honoured that the crafts council had given him the space. Also there was that rarely spotted and highly prized species at provincial festivals, arts luvvie from overseas.

Sir Christopher Frayling, chairman of arts council England and rector of London's royal college of art, said "Kilkenny has a huge reputation in the UK" as a centre for arts and design.

Crowds milled around the pastel-coloured pottery which Mr Frayling described as "the Mediterranean meets Ireland".

Security guards scrutinised arrivals, in order, said one, to deter the "undesirable element".

He agreed that neither ceramics nor the other show - of contemporary stained glass - were likely to attract trouble-makers but added "you never know with a free bar".

Meanwhile, the great unwashed were happily ensconced in pubs for their cultural highlight of the weekend, as live coverage beamed in from Croke Park on large screens.

Dozens of local artists took advantage of the festival by setting up impromptu galleries at venues from hotel lobbies to the courthouse in a clever attempt to sell directly to the public.

But the official visual art programme was proving to be less of a draw. At Cillín Hill, a "state-of-the-art" gleaming new livestock mart and the festival's flagship new venue, a series of video installations by international artists was deserted.

Moreover, the four-minute-long No Man Is An Island IIvideo by Danish artist Jesper Just played to an audience of just one reporter. The installation's sound wasn't working, but that could have been intentional.

The programme claimed Just's works "challenge the traditional notion that masculinity is incompatible with external displays of emotion". He should hang around to watch the farmers at the next cattle sale.