Culture

General disparagement that anyone concerned with their own patch must be a small-minded xenophobe fuelled the Brexit debate. Such lazy stereotyping of Leave voters by the liberal collective undermines its own self-perception as open-minded. In the midst of this continuing existential maelstrom, my metaphysical GPS has been happily trekking a terrain of books based on […]

We live in an age of ephemera and digital myopia that befuddle our wits and have thrown up the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Britain departs the European, stage right, after a campaign marred by cynicism and misinformation. The Siren sounds of advertising impel us to consume beyond what we need and corporations and their […]

‘The Nice Guys’ is a charmingly funny, buddy-comedy detective-thriller, written by Shane Black, of ‘Lethal Weapon’ fame. It stars Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger. The narrative is purposefully familiar: in 1977, Los Angeles, down-on-his-luck PI (Gosling’s pretty Holland March) and an enforcer for hire (Crowe’s grizzly Jackson Healy) find themselves working on opposing […]

When Andrius Mockus became mayor of Bogotá with its communities destroyed by drugs, crime and corruption he coined the phrase ‘citizen culture’, and called his strategy ‘subart’. The city’s cultural strategy was to encourage people to trust themselves, to take their lives into their own hands and to feel responsible as makers of the city […]

We need to address the future through a new lens, that of citizenship, if arts and culture are to play their necessary role in improving the quality of life for all. In looking forward we have, firstly, to understand that we are not just dealing with a recession and its aftershocks. There is a resetting […]

Season 4 of ‘House of Cards’ came out on Netflix earlier this year and was gobbled up in a matter of weeks by its fans. The opening sequence will be familiar to them, a series of shimmering images of Washington DC, first in morning light and ending with the channels of motor traffic pulsing through […]

The three Irish contestants for EU Capital of Culture 2020 are top-down and inadequately focus on culture as an agent for transforming people