WHERE were the pickets? The protesters trying to save us all from the corruption of seeing so many rude photos of men? The exhibit ion of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs opened on Wednesday night without a single public display of moral outrage. The following day the gallery was reported to be thronged with people. Where has all that Irish reticence gone?
Nearly, 100 people managed to make their way to the gallery for the opening, including novelist and Irish Times literary editor John Banville, who gave the opening speech. Vivienne Guinness was there to kill two birds with one stone by distributing tickets for her forthcoming party in the Olympic Ballroom to promote Lilliput Press's compulsively readable book of rock memories, My Generation.
Patrick Oman was there as was photographer Amelia Stein, novelist Colm Toibin, and enterprising duo Jay Bourke and Eoin Foyle, whose new restaurant Eden is in the same square as the gallery.
Germano Celent of the Guggenheim Museum in Genoa, who is the curator of the show, travelled over to hang the photographs in the gallery's extremely challenging space. The show is so big that, unusually, it is being shown in two parts - the show that opened on Wednesday will be taken down in January and replaced with the second half.