Sir, – I was interested to see Justine McCarthy’s piece titled “Irish writers, thespians and thinkers are having a renaissance” (Opinion, December 22nd).
Notably absent from her piece was reference to the visual arts. Indeed, The Irish Times used to have extensive weekly coverage of new exhibitions. For your paper now, however, the visual arts are enjoying the opposite of a renaissance. They are either dying or already dead. Without regular art criticism and coverage, there will be few resources for future art historians to assess how art exhibitions were received at any given time. The public will be unaware of much that is going on culturally. Artists young and old will be denied the opportunity to hear how their work is perceived by anyone other than their friends and peers.
The public expects better, more extensive coverage and critique of the visual arts. Then, perhaps, we might enjoy a real cultural renaissance. – Yours, etc,
GARRETT CORMICAN,
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.