So Dara, the Irish-British pop sensation who briefly graced Eurovision with her presence, has revealed she quit the contest twice. Twice. Because apparently, winning Europe’s kitsch festival is not enough for today’s artists. They must also have the luxury of walking away, of making a statement. How terribly modern. BBC celebrates this as a triumph of Irish-British cultural unity, but I see something else: a symbol of our age’s intellectual and artistic decay.
Consider the historical parallel. In the late Roman Empire, gladiators and charioteers became celebrities, their every whim celebrated by a populace that had lost its moral compass. Today, we have Eurovision: a parade of sequins, dissonant pop, and politically correct posturing. Dara’s announcement is just the latest example of an artist using a platform to signal virtue rather than create lasting art. Quitting twice suggests not conviction but indecision, a desperate need for attention in a culture that values outrage over substance.
We live in an era of intellectual decadence. The Victorians had their Great Exhibition, a celebration of industry and progress. We have a song contest where the winner is chosen by a mix of jury votes and public whim, and where the most memorable moments are often the most bizarre. And now, even the winners cannot stay still. They must quit, return, and quit again, as if consistency were a vice.
National identity, once a source of pride and anchor for culture, is now a marketing tool. Dara styles herself as Irish-British, a double-barrelled hyphenate that pleases BBC executives but means little to those who remember a time when artists represented a nation, not a brand. Her quitting is a metaphor for our times: we start things, we stop them, we have no commitment to anything but our own image.
Let us be clear. This is not about Dara. She is a symptom. The disease is a culture that celebrates the ephemeral, the ironic, the self-absorbed. We have swapped the rigour of the classical tradition for the noise of the pop charts. We have traded the moral earnestness of the Victorians for the shallow activism of Instagram. Dara’s exit, covered breathlessly by the press, is just another data point in the decline.
What would a Victorian observer make of this? They would shake their heads at a society that crowns a singer for a song about, well, does anyone remember the lyrics? They would be baffled by the idea that winning is not enough, that one must also perform heroics of renunciation. They would see, as I do, a civilisation that has lost its sense of purpose.
The BBC’s celebration is predictable. They are the cheerleaders of this circus, the ones who profit from the spectacle. But for those of us who still believe in high art, in national pride without apology, in the idea that a culture should aim for the eternal rather than the viral, Dara’s quitting is a reminder of how far we have fallen.
So here is my advice: ignore Dara. Ignore the next pop star who quits something. Instead, read a book by Edmund Burke. Revisit a symphony by Beethoven. Understand what it meant to create something that lasted. The fall of Rome took centuries; our fall might be quicker. But it will be accompanied, no doubt, by a soundtrack of fading pop stars.
