Yikes! When did modern art become so darned respectable? Wednesday's Glen Dimplex Awards at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, was a velveteen riot of hushed niceties, genteel mannerisms and smart evening wear.
They even brought a government minister along to add that final dash of gravitas.
The Royal Hospital was wall to wall with arts world hobnobbers. Among the more prominent was Belgian exhibitor Catherine de Zegher, a member of the Glen Dimplex judging panel, who recounted the success of her recent Drawing Room Gallery project in New York which has had the arts world stroking its collective chin in awe/envy and which championed a slew of young Irish artists of whom Mark Cotter is probably best known.
Sharing drinks in the venue's upper chambers was Outsider exhibit curator Monika Kinley whose work has been on show at the IMMA for nigh on two years and remains a hit with the punters.
Clinking wine glasses with Minister Sile De Valera was British Council director Harold Fish, just back from Galway where he opened the On Sight art show, as part of the Galway Arts Festival. Looking quite dashing in an oxblood jacket was IMMA director Declan McGonagle who explained that the IMMA had absolute dollops of post-modern kitschfree fun in store for the millennium - mostly in next month's exhibits by Alfred Walliss and James Dixon. Among the artists shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex prize was Belfast sculptor Susan MacWilliam, looking forward to a forthcoming exhibit at the Context Gallery in Derry which will explore the role of mediums and spiritualists in the early 20th century followed by a 12-month residency at the PS1 centre in New York, one of the US east coast's most prestigious galleries, we are assured.
Wexford multi-media dabbler Orla Barry was expounding on her - as yet vaguely formulated - plans to decamp from the Brussels base where she has worked for the past six years and return to Ireland. National Gallery director Raymond Keaveney shared a chuckle with his opposite number at the National Museum, Dr Pat Wallace, and IMMA chairman Maurice Foleyaire spent the evening expounding on the delight's of modern art before the Minister You'll want to know who won the actual awards, of course..
The life-time achievement award (or Sustained Contribution award to give it its proper, if slightly stolid title) went to groundbreaking Kilkenny painter Tony O'Malley, accompanied by wife Jane. For the first time the prize proper, and a not inconsiderable £15,000 cheque, wnet to a artist outside Ireland: London experimentalist Catherine Yass. Catherine admits to a certain fascination with taboo "male spaces" in her work - of which public toilets are, apparently, the most discernible example. Not sure we really quite understood what she was on about, but it all sounded terribly cool in a dehumanised Bladerunner kinda way.