Ireland's political and cultural magazine
Kendrick Lamar is one of the most popular high-brow artists. He is one of very few people in history whose work during their lifetime has been at once widely listened to (nearly 20 million hits already for the top tracks of this album on Spotify) and deeply scrutinised: every lyric, every note and harmony […]
In 2018, the New York Times named ‘An Octoroon’ by the American playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins the second-best play since ‘Angels in America’ (putting first for some reason the excruciating ‘Topdog/Underdog’) – but despite this, the play is scintillating and worth seeing. It is complicated to summarise, but essentially, Jacobs-Jenkins reworks a Nineteenth-Century play called […]
Rory O’Sullivan watched Bridgerton Season 2 yet wonders why anyone would bother. A period-piece represents the past and by representing dominates it. In general, the past survives only mythologically, as a collection of loose figures and attitudes in the present. In a period-piece, the prevailing attitude imbues these figures with itself and alters the past […]
In Spring, when I was born, Ireland was full of daffodils: in the city in window-boxes and the front-gardens of houses, apartment-buildings, and on the stony small ridges beside footpaths as well as here and there in forests and uncultivated fields. I have always identified strongly with the daffodil. I have never said so […]
Everywhere Salvatore of Lucan’s art combines a rigorous and searching honesty about all the most characteristic aspects of a single place, time and self with the intense feeling of a world which is not that place and time – even his name: as much serious as joking, as much old as completely new. […]
a few hundred pages of hard books – or else a few minutes with the sculptures of Giacometti Theorists try to understand the world as if unfolding in a giant process with certain rules, whereas for artists the point is to observe it as a spectacle of which any thoughts and representations are just […]
In poetry the nearest figure to Patrick Kavanagh is Charles Baudelaire. Both were often destitute. Both found a verse that was above all music, not aspiring to music, like Walter Pater said of every art-form, but music itself made of words and because of it more profound. For both men the heart […]