I

This writer has long been an admirer of Schreker. Reading about this composer, Macdara came across the following extraordinary sentence:

It has taken quite some time for Schreker’s star to rise above the horizon below which it set on his death in 1934 (a fateful year which also saw the death of Holst, Elgar and Delius).

Now let us leave aside the star metaphor, which is of wholly unremarkable kitschiness, and let us pay attention instead to the wording in brackets. Holst…Elgar…and Delius. What? 

It is unthinkable that an Irish person would write something so gauche. If a selection of Irish artists had died in the same year as, say, Matisse, we would never read:

Matisse’s star has stayed well above the horizon since his death in 1954 (a fateful year that also saw the deaths of Jack B. Yeats, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett).

It is just not possible for the people of a small country to be so evidently parochial. On the contrary, Macdara has noticed for many years the extraordinary parochialism of the citizens of the Imperialist countries. In the case of the English, this extends to a childlike ignorance of the borders of their own country, since they need not detain themselves with the exact make-up of their Kingdom beyond the area bounded by an arc running through, say, Cambridge, Oxford and Bath.

In Ireland there is an utterly different sense of a diaphanous border. In the first place, there is the distinction between the twenty-six country State and the real border of the Nation. That aside, there is the acknowledgement of the spread of Irish people far beyond our island. Despite the exceptional belief that those of us outside the State must be denied a vote in our own country, there is at least the recognition that the Nation exceeds the State, a useful check on claims that can be made for the representativeness of the petty Dublin government.

The English attitude is emphatically not an openness to the world, it is an assumption that Englishness, in its drag disguise as Britishness, is projected onto the whole globe, since all people must aspire to the status of a normal—which is to say an English—person. One way that this impacts on life lived in London: your correspondent has learnt to his cost not to trust the local press in their reviews of local artists. Macdara thinks for example of a tedious evening attending Adès’s The Tempest; sample headlines: “A triumph for Britain’s brightest and best”; “Brits lead the way”. In truth it was the libretto rather than the music that ruined the evening: Macdara cannot verify this, but he recalls Miranda singing it’s bad, dad, I’m sad. American reviewers found it harder to overlook these problems.

The Guardian’s review of the opera ends with this:

The cheering from every corner of the theatre on Tuesday – orchestra pit included – felt like what it was: British opera’s equivalent of the England World Cup rugby win.

By gum, it was like Twickers on a match day, the real spirit of the Blitz! Note the slip between Britain and England in this short passage, proving Macdara correct in everything he has ever written about this odd feudal relic.

II

Worst of all, however, was a Hockney exhibition of groundbreaking stupidity and ugliness—and overwhelming popularity. There is no country in the world, bar one, that can treat Hockney’s sub-South Park creations as serious works of art.

Here is an example of how his gaudy tackiness was received by officialdom:

[Calling these ‘landscape works’] comes nowhere near encapsulating the mystical, profound, plain beautiful pictures presented at the Royal Academy […] These pictures, whose age-old theme is refreshed by their beauty, have the consideration of a lifetime’s painting and the energy for more. They, having gestated and evolved in his head, attaining mythical quality, predict the vibrancy of the new work even as they indicate Hockney’s peaceful acceptance of a world beyond himself.

Ok girl. 

Hurly-burly, aggression and panic are all but banished from the new work […] Several of the paintings in the Winter Timber and Totems room, such as the monumental Winter Timber (2009) […] with its somewhat grouchy be-faced bright purple tree stump, ochre logs lying along the receding road, brown ferns and blue trees, have a radiating cultic stillness. The purple-shading-to-yellow tree stump in Still Standing (2009) is a masterpiece of tone, as delicate in its deadness as anything here.

Srsly, u ok?

How astonishing that Macdara can’t picture these immortal works; one might think that the visual experience of seeing purple-shading-to-yellow would stick in the mind, let alone grouchy be-faced [sic] tree stumps.

Hockney has tackled several scenes over and over and over again, a reaffirmation of the art of concentration best developed in Monet’s Water Lilies. Particularly successful in this respect is the Woldgate Woods series […] Hockney has given them an audacious, challenging composition, with a confrontational tree almost pushing out of the foreground[.]

It will be appreciated that Macdara has brought the above paragraph to an early end, before the confrontational tree has been joined by “inviting pale trunks and lithe shadows” of other trees. But surely, friends, this is satire, as every piece containing the word lithe must be?

Painted with a sure hand – there is no hesitation anywhere, in fact – it seduces you with its rich vision of spring, but is in fact less interesting than its companions, which show another medium Hockney has mastered [viz.] the vivid colouration and the wide range of marks he can make on the iPad. [“marks” ha! …]

He is doing in 2011 what Picasso did a century ago […] Hockney, in his works here so persistently at war with the boundaries of painting, has no trouble turning this conflict into graceful, meditative works[.]

Such drama, and yet all Macdara can remember thinking is that he had been fleeced in paying to see this shit. There is one single justification outstanding for this whole affair: that Hockey is completely taking the piss. Are the last few decades of this man’s career all a hoax? And if so, will he now admit it, since this sorry show is nearly a decade in the past? And all those others in the Imperialist media, were they in on it? Or can we expect them to commend the brilliance of this long con in language even more demented than that already expended upon him?