Sir, In his robust and beautifully erudite rebuttal (December 21st) of Kevin Myers's cogent criticism of some forms of contemporary art and the Glen Dimplex Artists Award in particular, the director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art surely has evaded the central point the importance of skill. Both the architect and builders of the Royal Hospital, although in their day, undoubtedly modernist and innovative in their approach, were masters of their craft.
By the same token, both Constable (arguably one of the earlier adventurers into Impressionism) and Picasso were first and foremost skilled draughtsmen, thereby creating for themselves a sound basis and authority from which to develop their modernist and abstract works. Where innovation and radicalism are the result of ideas, given form with skill, to advance the communicative aspects of art, they are valid. Otherwise, they are not. It is this integrity which separates the true and exciting modernist from the self indulgent dauber however much, or little, he feels he has a message to impart.
I would take issue, therefore, with Declan McGonagle when he says that those of us who view some such works with skepticism are merely followers of prevailing and perceived truths, and thus resistant to change. I would put it to him that those who presently have influence in the direction that contemporary art is taking, are doing it a disservice by presenting it in a micro climate, equally limiting in its criteria, of upholding an old fashioned sense of mystique, elitism and thus, in his words, colonising their adherents to being avant garde uncritically for its own sake. This climate, maintained and endorsed in some measure by both the IMMA and the Tate, is, in my mind, too indulgent to those who, addicted to exhibitionist whims, expect an ever more bemused public to legitimise it. Yours, etc., Carrigglas Manor, Longford.