At a certain point last year, I ceased to pay much attention to the finer details in the furore over who was doing what in the Irish Museum of Modern Art - much as a district justice in Tuam Courthouse superintending a dispute between the McDonaghs and the Wards might similarly discover that his thoughts are elsewhere, writes Kevin Myers.
So it is with a mind almost uncontaminated by either knowledge of who did what in the imbroglio between IMMA's former director, Declan McGonagle, the former chairman Marie Donnelly, and the former replacement for Declan McGonagle, Brian Kennedy, that I turn to IMMA's future, under the new chairman, Eoin McGonigal, SC. And already I can sympathise with the district justice in Tuam, having just heard of 12 different Patrick Wards, and 14 different Patrick McDonaghs, all of whom claim to have bought the same horse, putting down his pencil, rubbing his eyes, and allowing his mind wander to a distant trout stream.
Different names
Naturally, a dispute in the world of Irish modern art couldn't have involved a dramatis personae with utterly different names - a Zpdowksi here, and a Aaachen there, with maybe a Jchuken and a Pppstrami thrown in for good measure. That would have been a civilised way to populate a comprehensible drama. .
But instead, 50 per cent of the IMMA's main cast share variants of the same name. There is the dreadful possibility that this affair might soon attract new participants, named McGonigall, MacGonigall, Magonigal, Mcgonigle, M'Gonigal and Macgonigall. Exit Ireland's art critics, plucking out their hair and screeching.
That aside, and in my position of unassailable ignorance, I intend to make no observations of the rights and wrongs of what happened between Marie Donnelly and Declan Mcthingummy. But I will say that when Marie Donnelly wrote in this newspaper a couple of weeks ago that "IMMA is not going away", she was unquestionably, and unfortunately, speaking the truth.
For IMMA is a travesty, a deplorable and witless celebration of the trite, the meretricious, the trivial. It has allowed the unskilled and the untalented hanging space and exhibition room to declare to the world how little artistic merit is needed to make a public name these days. So many "conceptual" artists are so without the rudimentary artistic proficiency which allows their works to speak for themselves that they are obliged to provide an accompanying text, often enough composed of feminist, post-colonial, gay-rights doggerel.
It is often hard to know which is the more tiresome: the light bulb in a bowl of porridge, or the accompanying explanation that it emblemises in a truly meaningful way the dynamic conflict in cultural paradigms resulting from the Shannon hydro-electrification scheme bringing artificial light to Kerry. But of course, even that explanation couldn't be a realistic possibility, because it would require the artist to have heard of events like the Shannon project, and most conceptualists appear know as little about history as they do about art.
Tate Modern horrors
It's not just IMMA, of course. It's what's happened to art everywhere. I spent a truly depressing afternoon in the Tate Modern in London recently. I'm sorry that I didn't bring my pet flamethrower with me. Otherwise, I am quite unable to bring myself to describe the horrors within. Even the exhibition of surrealist work was almost without technical merit of any kind, showing that the malaise of modern art is at least three quarters of a century old. I would have had a more culturally rewarding afternoon feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. They, after all, would have had more to say to me than most of the artists exhibiting in the Tate.
Must IMMA go the same way? Now as it happens, I know and like the new chairman Eoin McGonigal. He is a barrister of outstanding personal and professional integrity, and by the perverse circularity of justice which has characterised so much of Irish life in the past decade or so, is now also representing Charles Haughey through his various travails.
It was Charles Haughey who as Taoiseach took the magnificently-restored Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the only great 17th century building in Ireland, and transformed it into what it is now: a ravaged and melancholy warehouse for the very worst that artists of the 20th century - and now, alas, the 21st century - could throw at us.
Royal Hospital
I suppose it is beyond even the considerable powers of Eoin McGonigal to give us back our lovely old Royal Hospital. But we do need a director for IMMA; and one by chance has just appeared - Ivan Massow, the chairman of the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, who last week was sacked for his denunciations of modern art as "craftless tat."
His credentials for IMMA were especially enhanced by his studied and intellectually irreproachable critique of the "artist" Tracey Emin, she of the unmade bed which won the Turner prize a couple of years ago, and of a later "exhibit" - the tent listing the names of all the people who had given her orgasms, including, naturally enough, herself. Miss (stet Miss) Emin was, he said, "a silly bitch".
And frankly, that is about as much attention, verbally or intellectually, both she and the world which so rewards her actually deserve: a curt dismissal, before we move onto other things. Ivan Massow, on the other hand, is a serious champion of artistic merit: of scholarship, of technical skill, of ambitious intent, and of cultural catholicity. And finally and most vitally, his qualifications for IMMA are made simply unassailable by his name: which is McGonigal in none of its forms.