Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Sinn Fein reps are quite the culture vultures this week, with the notable exception of culture minister Caral Ni Chuilin.    Máirtín Ó Muilleoir is curating an exhibition of ‘political art’ hosted at the Golden Thread Gallery.   It includes an offering by Conrad Atkinson (above), which apparently caused controversy back in the 70s, when Protestant museum workers refused to hang the painting at the Ulster Museum.   As it happens, they may have acted on aesthetic rather than sectarian motivations, because, aside from its questionable 'political message', the artwork looks rather like it was painted by a disturbed four year old child.      However all art exhibitions are certainly not equal in Shinner land.  According to the Irish News our so called culture minister has declined an invitation to attend the Royal Ulster Academy’s 130 th Annual Exhibition , which gets underway at the Ulster Museum today.  One of its exh...

A neat conjunction of some of the themes of this website, the picture above shows a newspaper, in Russian, called ‘British Unionist’. The shot was taken in the State Museum of Political History in St Petersburg. Clearly the ‘unionism’ which this propaganda sheet is promoting is the trade union variety, rather than the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Nevertheless I remain slightly tempted to replace the banner with something featuring this photo. For anyone who might be curious, the painting which currently forms the background for Three Thousand Versts’ banner is ‘Barge Haulers on the Volga’ by Ilya Repin. Repin’s powerful canvas hangs in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the painting is often held to allude to the latent political might of Russia’s people. And yes, I did go to see it.

Brian Crowe’s prohibitively erudite blog, Burke’s Corner, picks up a story concerning militant atheist Richard Dawkins’ attitude to Christmas . Brian detects a contradiction between Dawkins’ strident anti-Christian polemics and his enjoyment of explicitly religious Christmas traditions and allusions. It transpires that Dawkins is an unlikely participant in the singing of carols and acknowledges more generally that a lack of basic knowledge of biblical literature diminishes full appreciation of our culture. There is certainly a fundamental irony in so visceral an opponent of Christianity appreciating and indeed participating in singing songs which celebrate the very narrative which he feels has inflicted so much damage on society. Brian quotes Theo Hobson writing in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free: "it won't do to call carols beautiful but meaningless. For their beauty is obviously related to their content. Their power derives from the particular story they tell: the birth of ...