Sir, - Aidan Dunne's review of the NCAD exhibition of graduate student work at the RHA Gallagher Gallery (Arts, June 14th) makes the point that in this kind of exhibition "it is reasonable that work will be derivative". Mr Dunne also admits that Irish students' expectations of lucrative success have been stimulated by the "Brit Art phenomenon" - i.e., the spectacular success of young British artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. It is certainly useless to deny the reality that Ireland - in visual artistic terms - is destined to perpetual provinciality. Artistically speaking, Ireland is a natural satellite, resigned to such contentment as may be derived from revolving around the nearest primary centre of civilisation.
In Ireland's case, this centre is London. If London decides that painting cattle chewing the cud is the right thing for visual artists to do, Dublin artists will certainly do the same. However, since London artists are not currently painting cattle, but are engaged in all manner of weird and ridiculous experiments, it will come as no surprise that young Irish wannabe-Hirsts are engaged in similar antics. Unlike Mr Dunne, who found the NCAD students' work "reasonable", I found much (if not most) of it irrational and profoundly depressing. It is bad enough to visit IMMA (at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham) and see incredibly boring and meaningless video displays; but the NCAD students' exhibition brings it home to one that young, innocent and possibly gifted Irish art students are being encouraged to indulge in this patently banal pursuit. For those who have not yet had the boundless pleasure of viewing modernist video displays, they seem to involve filming people doing something particularly uninteresting, then playing back the results in very slow motion. The effect is invariably mind-numbing.
Traditionally, being art studies entailed a lengthy apprenticeship in order to learn extraordinary and difficult skills. However, if (as Mr Dunne suggests) today's art students are aiming to become Damien Hirsts, it is doubtful that art school is the right place for them. If they intend to slice calves lengthways down the middle and float them in formaldehyde, they might do better to apprentice themselves to an undertaker. If their ambition is to stack shelves with drugs, perhaps they should be thinking about pharmacological college. If they want to do videos, why not go to film school? I accept that there is a difficulty here: film schools insist on teaching their students how to captivate and entertain humanity, whereas the purpose of art videos seems to be to bore us all to suicide. - Yours, etc.,
Colin Brennan, Nutley Square, Dublin 4.