The conclusions of the Hutton inquiry seem to have come as a surprise to many. Perhaps if people had considered his time here in the North there would have been less surprise. Lord Hutton actually represented British soldiers in Widgery's original Bloody Sunday inquiry. This original whitewash is now so discredited that a second inquiry is deemed necessary.

Lord Hutton's career then took him to the Diplock Courts where he continued to support the establishment and after that to defending Pinochet from extradition back to Chile.

With this background it is perhaps not surprising that Tony Blair put him in charge of the investigation surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly. Blair is very aware of the procedures of law as well as the importance of appearing statesmanlike in government. The remit of the enquiry was to be focused. The person chosen was known to have a narrow perspective in certain matters. Is it any wonder then that we got yet another whitewash. No 'dodgy dossiers', no difficult questions about the truth behind WMD and no concern about Downing Street's involvement in drawing up the dossier used to bolster the case for going to war. Auntie Beeb and the media in general were getting spiked.

On the very same day this was all going on in Britain, over in Italy Blair's friend and political ally Berlusconi was working yet another Machiavellian trick against the media. Silvio Berlusconi is both prime minister and owner of a media empire. This more or less allows him to dictate how he and his government are portrayed on Italian television and in newspapers. His near-monopoly of the media was coming under slight pressure with his channel Retequattro being moved to satellite to ensure conformity with the law on competition. This was supposed to have happened at the beginning of this year. However on 23 December 2003 Berlusconi signed a decree reprieving Retequatro. The senate then approved this decree on 28 January.

So let's move on from Pinocchio, as the Italians call Berlusconi and what Seumas Milne in the Guardian calls "the Alice in Wonderland of Lord Hutton" to an art work with the title Snow White and the madness of truth . It is an installation by Gunilla Sköld and Dror Feiler at the Natural Historical Museum in Stockholm. This is how Israel's daily newsmagazine Israel Insider describes it: "There, in a basin two meters by five, with water colored to resemble blood, floated a boat labelled Snow White with the smiling photo of the suicide bomber who killed 22 restaurant patrons and staff at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa on October 4." The installation has become infamous because when the Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Zvi Mazel saw the work he physically attacked it. He pulled out plugs and threw a light into the water. This act of art vandalism has been given the backing of Ariel Sharon and his entire government. Death threats have of course been made against the artists and only one of them has been willing to comment.

Feiler, a paratrooper for three years in Israel's army and whose family still lives there, says of course he does not agree with suicide bombers. Dror is an artist making a comment about what is going on in the country of his birth. Sharon, Mazel or the entire Israeli government may not share his point of view but this does not mean that they can use acts of vandalism to suppress it.

We are moving in a direction where people in courts and governments are suppressing comment and criticism. In terms of freedom we are going backwards. Consider this comment I found in a recent ARTnews Retrospective. It was written on December 5, 1903 . "Judge Halsey of the Superior Court of Wisconsin recently decided that a newspaper had the right to criticize the work of an artist as long as it did not personally attack the artist himself. The decision was in a case in which a sculptor sued a newspaper for heavy damages because of a critical article published in reference to a model prepared in the competition for the making of a monument." What would the history of twentieth-century art have looked like if we had not developed our criticism of art objects? What will the history of the twenty-first century look like if Hutton, Blair, Berlusconi, Sharon and others in power are allowed their way?

visual arts south

Aidan Dunne

The informed observer

Bertrand Russell once defined matter as "a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn't." Looking at the Gallery of Photography's recent exhibition of Butlins photographs, with the slightly Orwellian sounding Butlins motto as title, Our True Intent is All for Your Delight, it was clear that the holiday camps were the forerunners of today's theme parks, close relatives of Disneyland and Euro Disney. More, there was a kind of innocence to the optimistic fabrication of, to borrow Robert Lowell's phrase, "premeditated fun."

They'd papered over the cracks, disguised the humdrum and the everyday, but a bit pathetically, none too effectively, and the disparity between the illusion and the underlying reality hinted at something terrible and more fundamental than the question of whether everyone was having a good time. God made the world out of nothing, as Paul Valery put it - but the nothing shows through. That is, seen in retrospect, the Butlins photographs suggest the possibility that the holiday camp and the theme park are designed to create the illusion that something is happening because of the dread possibility that nothing is happening.

In the same way, we visit some site of outstanding natural beauty or special scientific interest, and we look at something, something very like a blank immensity that is resolutely indifferent and immune to our presence. We are naturally awed by it but we cannot find a way in, cannot feel anything, cannot say much, or anything at all, about it, apart, perhaps from summoning a few empty superlatives. But that's okay because there, on the spot, is an Interpretative Centre to restore the purely unknown to the realm of the knowable, the unsayable to the realm of language. To make it all comprehensible and cut it down to size. The nothing may show through but at least it's kept at bay.

But perhaps that experience on the far side of the known and the mediated is a good thing, something necessary. In 1815 in the Swiss Alps, a chamois hunter guiding a visiting, distinguished geologist suggested that the big boulders they were looking at had been deposited there by glaciers in some dim past. The geologist knew he was talking nonsense and ignored him. The hunter's dazzling insight, one that changed our view of the world, no less, emerged from his contact with the puzzle of the landscape. An interpretative centre of the time would have told the poor misguided fool that the rocks had been washed up by Noah's flood. Does information, tailored and carefully presented, enrich the experience, or does it actually supplant the experience, make it something else entirely? That is one of the main areas of contention in the debate that raged about interpretative centres.

It is related to the way that, throughout the 1990s, the theory and practice of the design of museum display were radically transformed. Such concepts as narratives and journeys were introduced. It was important to carefully structure the visitors' encounter with the exhibits, to process them at the entrance, provide them with a narrative, to take them on a journey and deposit them, suitably enlightened, at the exit. A logical development, on the face of it, one likely to make the experience of a visit to a museum more amenable, less alienating. One arising from the perfectly reasonable desire to explain, to impart information, to take the fear out of the process.

But if what we see and, more, experience, is effectively placed and defined by the time we come to it, the whole thing has become as packaged and removed as a theme park, a purely manufactured experience with a predetermined structure. All of which can be very manageable and reassuring, so perhaps it's for the best. Suppose we take an opposite view: It may be good to be cast adrift, to be faced with something that is blankly unknowable or just perplexing. This is precluded if we are told what the artist intends, the work's contextual background, and so on.

There's nothing wrong with information. But it's not our ignorance, our need for information that is the spur, it's that curious, uncomfortable, disconcerting state of being faced with the blankness - the nothingness - of things, the fact that it doesn't make sense to us. It's a question of how we come to know rather than the mere availability of information.

fifth column

Noel Sheridan

Sublime slipper

My daughter had flown Virgin Atlantic to New York, so she got the slippers that said 'Suite Dreams'. One word per slipper, with the lovely blood-red lettering embedded in the snow-white wool. 'Suite' left; 'Dreams' right.

I was sitting on the side of the bed, trying to get fully awake. I was to make the coffee, but I couldn't get my eyes off the slippers she'd left for me. I couldn't just put my feet into the slippers and go into the little kitchen in her apartment and make the coffee. I couldn't put them on because they looked too much like an artwork. They looked like an artwork because of the cunning form - slippers - and the striking cursive text - blood-red.

There was something post-neon-sign-artwork about them. No clunky wiring.

I had been in New York for a week and seen a lot of art, so everything was looking like art. I know that's what is supposed to happen, if the art is any good; but the other thing about New York is that you are supposed to do something about it, Make work.

OK. It's some kind of Readymade. You feel you could eat these slippers, they look like marshmallows and, according to Gombrich, that's how taste and ideas of beauty begin. We start with marshmallows, but become surfeited. Then we need something grittier to stimulate taste - going from Renoir to Judd, say. Developed taste. If he's right then this slipper piece will register at a primal level and allow the spectator to get that primary ingenuous taste-hit, mediated, now, through an art context, with the mandatory ironic distancing built in.

Slippers don't have left and right, but convention, i.e., language, if it is to make sense, must impose that order. (The faultline of language vis à vis reality. Slippage! And the slipper/text piece exemplifies that fascism; first left, then right, only.) If you're at all in to Cubism, where back becomes front and sides switch, you'll cherish a conceptual echo/ frisson in the slipper work.

Virgin Corporation modified 'Sweet' but left 'Dreams' lie. This was to brand the new 'sleeping seat' in the First Class Sleeping Suite on Virgin Atlantic. So nothing here of ' ýhe grief that lies at the heart of existence' - quite the reverse in fact. This is apt for High Capitalism, but too direct for art. Beautiful, but not poignant. So modify 'Dreams' to read 'Direams' ('Dire' Đ and reams of it), but better, maybe, is 'Diereams'. (Say it. Die. Death - how you can't beat time. Grittier. Beyond poignant.)

If it's beyond poignant, it may be Edmund Burke's Sublime and now that I'm awake that is beginning to impinge.

The slippers then are emblematic of a sense of nature coerced through artificial apertures into the servitude of the turbines of massive hurtling technology, merrily consuming the ever diminishing natural resources of earth.

So here's the work: Buy a first class ticket on Virgin. Settle in. Get the slippers. If you can wear them, they're beautiful. If you can't, they're sublime. If neither of these, just go asleep.