Gavan Reilly

In the last week I’ve happened to find myself in two different museums – the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, Dublin, and the rather excellent Ulster Museum at the Botanic Gardens in Belfast (the latter comes particularly recommended – it’s basically a Best Of museum with brilliant stuff across all disciplines).

Two thoughts struck me as I wandered around both:

– Isn’t there something sad about the fact that, although having a famous artist’s collections distributed around the world means more people have greater access to them, you can’t go to any one place to see an entire artist’s collection? I was meant to be in Amsterdam earlier this week (cheers, Eyjafjallajokull). It would make sense that I would be able to take in the entire collection of Piet Mondrian – an artist whose works have always been particularly striking to me – while in his hometown, or at least his home country. Yet, I saw some of his stuff in MoMA, New York, and more of it in IMMA last week.

Isn’t it sad that there aren’t individual go-to places for this kind of stuff? To me it’s a shame that there’s nowhere where you can see every non-privately owned Warhol / da Vinci / Monet/ Mondrian / whoever.

– Being a geek, and as something of a corollary to the first thought, it strucke me as a shame that that whatever about the merits of having all an artist’s work in one place (because, fair enough, people are allowed to have private collections in one place or another) – why isn’t more of an effort made to harness the internet in allowing people enjoy art from a distance? Why should I have to go to IMMA or the Ulster Museum or MoMA to enjoy a piece of art on tour? Why can’t the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation reproduce graphics of every piece of work the guy painted?

And, more pressingly, why don’t more people create more art for the internet? It seems to me that nobody creates artistic exhibitions made directly for the screen (other than in video form, but I mean in the more traditional sense of exhibition – static artwork and words, etc).

Here’s an idea: make an exhibition that instead of being limited to one place at any one time, exists everywhere for everyone to see. Set up a website, ask people to hit F11 and click the ‘Enter’ link, and use the screen to create and showcase art.

It’s something I’ve been pondering, and something I might revisit. Watch this space.

(And yes, I haven’t blogged in ages. Suffice it to say I’ve been sleeping up.)

• Catch up on sleep.
• No, really, catch up on sleep. A LOT of sleep. Most production weekends sleep is a sincere luxury.
• Corollary to this, I’m going to try and address the bags under my eyes. You could fit a small independent republic in them right now. I’ve always had some bags, but not on this scale. Cucumbers and wet tea bags ahoy.
• Exercise more. Production weekend diets are delicious, but fail.
• Try to figure out what to do with every second weekend of my life.
• Observe a graaaaaaaaaaand stretch in the evenings.
• Try to get a job. Interested?
• Write a manual on the nuances of the Observer website and how the whole thing is synced with our Twitter and Facebook, as well as how the whole podcast (and iTunes integration) thing works. It’ll be far too mind-boggling for anyone to try and fly blind in so some kind of crossover document is very much called for.
• Get back blogging on a regular basis. (No, really!)
• Bid a fond farewell to a university that has given me a hell of a lot in the last six years. I’ve gotten far more than a degree out of UCD: I got a sense of what I want to do with my life, I’ve gotten to present radio shows and edit newspapers, be the secretary of an association with 23,000 members, and – far most importantly – make a fortunate series of  very, very good friends, too plentiful to name, who I’ll try not to leave behind me as I go on to whatever comes next.
• Oh, and I’m not going to go about setting up a new country again. Well, not for a while… *wink*
• Go to Amsterdam for a few days in May with the other half. Can’t wait.
• Master the Italian language. I started learning it last summer using a Pimsleur guide and love it. (Note to self: also rescue your once-formidable, now-negligable command of German.)
• Reintroduce myself to the friends I’ve become sadly all too distant from as a result of working 60-hour weeks.
• Thank the people who convinced me to go for the Observer job in the first place. You know who you are – I owe you for pushing me over the edge.
• Really miss the fun, political incorrectness, late nights, early mornings, sport-watching and everything else that I shared with the rest of the team. To Sean, Conor, Grace, Sweetman, Matt, Peter, James, Farouq, Scally, Killian, Bridget and to Catriona: thank you for making my year such a blast. There was never a day where I didn’t want to go into work – the Observer has been far more than a mere job. You’ve been my second family and I’ll remember it for a long long time to come.
• Finally, I’m going to make sure my long-suffering girlfriend Ciara gets to see a little more of my face, and that she’s full aware of how much I’ve needed and cherished her patience with me when I’ve had other things on my mind over the last eight months. The Observer is an all-consuming black hole of time and I’d fully understand if I’d been told to pack my bags for the short attention she’s gotten this year – but I haven’t. She’s been a rock all year and I’ll owe her forever.

So. What’s next?

I’ve got some time off this week while UCD’s on a mid-term break so in my lazy bedridden mornings, I’ve been catching up on reading, watching, and generally consuming things that I’ve had on the long finger for a bit.

One of the big things on the list – well, not that I considered it a major point, but ‘big’ in the sense that it was 90 minutes long and substantially larger than I’d anticipated – was Steve Jobs’ iPad keynote address.

This brought me nicely to a post on MediaGuardian’s PDA blog featuring five videos on how different magazine or newspaper publishers might use the touch-screen platform that the iPad will offer.

There’s a few varying approaches but these two are my favourites, showing exactly how phenomenal the power of a versatile large, touch-screen interface when combined with the fluidity of omnipresent online connectivity.

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Following on from my last post, an article I wrote for the day job earlier this month on the topic of male body image and eating disorders. I was disappointed that in the end I only got to speak to one authoritative voice – a lot of other interviews fell through at the last minute – but I did my best nonetheless.

Read the rest of this entry »

So – hello again; again, apologies for my ludicrous absence from these here parts, the day job has exhausted my writing muscles for the last two months or so but as things wind down for the mid-term break I find myself with a little more time to flex them back here.

Also, before I begin, I owe some gratitude to the kind soul(s) who saw fit to nominate me in the Irish Blog Awards in the Best News/Current Affairs category – I hardly think I deserve to be in such high esteem, especially given the others who’ve made the same shortlist, but to whoever thought me worth nominating: thank you, I’m honestly quite humbled.

Anyhoo, to my point.

In the last few weeks my mind has been significantly occupied by the subject of body image – begetting a feature on male eating disorders for The University Observer which I might cross-post in the coming days – but while out shopping in Dublin earlier today, a particular though crystallised in my mind. I’ll add the pre-emptive caveat that yes, I’m a man, and no, I’m not a horrific chauvanist pig because I reckon a lot of what I say below refers to men too, but obviously to a lesser degree.

Now, I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but at some point in the last two or three years years, there seems to have been some kind of major departure between ‘fashion’ and ‘beauty’ – namely, that two concepts which in theory should go hand in hand have become if not total opposites, then uneasy bedfellows indeed.

As we were out shopping – the missus was out hunting for a dress – it became very obvious that very few high street fashion chains cater for what we might call the naturally-shaped woman. Most women, we might all agree, have boobs, a bum, and generally (whether they think it’s ideal or not) exhibit some degree of curviness. Yet, visit any high-street fashion chain and the extreme majority of them seem, at the moment, to cater solely for six-foot-nothing waifs. That’s all well and good for haute couture but when you’re looking at a commercial market for a country where most women aren’t six-foot skinnies, it’s both economically daft and mentally damaging.

Most women aren’t skinny or tall enough to fit the clothes that high-street chains see fit to bring to the mass market – but not that this seems to matter to oodles of retailers who overlook the commercial reality of what might actually work. But that’s not really the crux of my point.

It genuinely seems that of late, what is deemed ‘fashionable’ bears only a tangential reality to what the majority of us actually find aesthetically pleasing – or, if you will, ‘pretty’. Where presumably the origin of ‘fashion’ as a notion was to combine the aims of augmenting the body’s own beauty and some sort of edgy innovative design flair, of late the former goal has been thrown out the window as what is deemed ‘fashion’ is merely whatever seems the most striking.

It’s gotten to the point where shops are selling outfits (dresses, tops, whatever… I’m not good with the terminology) that don’t try to flatter the wearers at all, but seem intent on making them look as daft and dingbatty as they can. Lady GaGa – though undoubtedly not meaning to – has merely furnished the trend of clothes that almost seem to spite the wearer; her lightning-bolt-over-one-shoulder thing now seems to pervade every store, leading shops (who still trip over themselves to portray themselves as haute couture when, though people admire it, they’d never want to wear it themselves) to start stocking similar stuff, hoodwinking regular people into looking like absolute idiots for the sake of being trendy. The problem is that nobody looks at Lady Gaga wearing a crow’s nest around her head and goes, “Wow, she looks beautiful”, they go, “Wow, that’s… eh… striking” – but nobody tries to distinguish the two any more.

It’s gotten to the point where honest-to-god beautiful women like Katie Holmes get ludicrous, asymmetric, uneven, scraggly haircuts because the fashion gods on high decree them to be on the stylistic button – full in the knowledge that they’ll look all the lesser as a result.

Maybe it’s just me being some kind of boring traditionalist but if more shops did what Karen Millen do – make decent dresses for your average curvy bird (though, that said, I saw a few one-shoulder monstrosities in there earlier too) – and stopped trying to feed people fashion when it’s that fashion that’s leading people to such insecurity, we might be a whole lot better off.

Penney’s does brilliantly for a multitude of reasons, and not just because it’s dirt cheap.