The pun in the title of Barbara (1944–94) and Murray Grigors’ Scotch Myths exhibition indicates the wit and sense of fun with which it was mounted. However, this should not obscure the fact that the exhibition constitutes a major political intervention in Scottish affairs, albeit across the terrain of ideology. Its political purpose was to provoke debate about the representation of Scotland and the Scots and the first effects of this have already been seen in the Bulletin of Scottish Politics issue which includes two separate reviews of the exhibition itself and four other contributions which address the same problem the exhibition poses. The purpose of this article is to give some indication of the strategy of the exhibition and to point to some of the ways it needs to be followed up so that the issue of ideological representation remains firmly on the agenda in Scottish political debate.

Lindsay Paterson's review of the exhibition is the more supportive, in that it recognises that the key issue posed is to what extent certain representations of Scotland and the Scots have become (and remain) dominant at the level of popular consciousness. Paterson agrees with the Grigors that the central traditions to be exposed and countered are Tartanry and Kailyard, particularly the former. The other, less supportive, review by P. H. Scott makes the argument that these traditions have less current political force than an earlier myth:

Whatever objective historical truth might underlie Scott's position, it betrays a certain blindness as to how ideology works, in the Scottish context, as a multifaceted system of images and categories of thought into which Scots of the last century and a half have been – to use Louis Althusser (1918–90)'s term – interpellated, set in place as social actors, their consciousness being defined within the limits of the capitalist system.