Culture

Heraclitus and Plato, evolving objectivity and the moronic internet

The Arts Council and the County and City Management Association (CCMA), the local government management network, have just agreed ‘A Framework for Collaboration’. The Framework culminates thirty years of collaboration between the Arts Council and the local authorities. It is promoted as a new way for these partners to work together, maximise the impact of […]

When probed by critics to contextualise their vast collection of photographs of industrial architecture, Hilla and Bernd Becher stated that, “just as the medieval thought is manifest in a Gothic cathedral”, then “so too is the industrial age captured in the machinery once scattered across our lands”. For more than 40 years the Bechers, husband […]

It is arguable that Aristotle – next to Homer – was James Joyce’s greatest master. Without the ‘Odyssey’, Joyce could never have conceived ‘Ulysses’; had he not written the book celebrating his first rendezvous with a beautiful girl from Galway, whatever he wrote would, however, have been profoundly marked by Aristotle. There is, I suggest, […]

Who remembers the car-crusher in Goldfinger? The Ford Motor Company supplied a range of its cars to this smash hit of the James Bond franchise, which came out in 1964. Quite near the end of the movie, the henchman Oddjob, a kind of cross between Jeeves the butler, Kim Jong-un and Cian Healy, drives a […]

‘The Left-Handed Gun’ is not a film that many people will have heard of, let alone seen. It’s a 1958 Western, starring Paul Newman and directed by Arthur Penn. And it was on TG4 a couple of Friday nights back. TG4’s weekly ‘An Western’ has been a quiet staple of Irish television for some years […]

The spark of any human venture is imagination. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in his ‘In Defence of Poetry’ distinguishes this from reason, the “enumeration of qualities already known”; whereas “imagination is the perception of the values of those qualities, both separately and as a whole… Reason is to imagination as the instrument […]