William Alexander Murray Grigor is a Scottish film-maker, writer, artist, exhibition curator and amateur architect who has served as director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. He has made over 50 films with a focus on arts and architecture.
Murray Grigor with Carol Colburn Grigor in 2012
Programme for the Scotch Myths exhibition, August 1981
Tartanry is the stereotypical or kitsch representation of traditional Scottish culture, particularly by the emergent Scottish tourism industry in the 18th and 19th centuries, and later by the American film industry. The earliest use of the word "tartanry" itself has been traced to 1973. The phenomenon was explored in Scotch Myths, a culturally influential exhibition devised by Barbara and Murray Grigor and Peter Rush, mounted at the Crawford Centre at the University of St Andrews in the Spring of 1981. Related terms are tartanitis, Highlandism, Balmorality, Sir Walter Scottishness, tartanism, tartan-tat, and the tartan terror.
"Tartan", the stereotypical tartan-wearing piper caricature that is the mascot of Scotia-Glenville High School in Scotia, New York
One type of Highlandism: a very romanticised and hyper-masculinised view of Highland men as "natural-bred warriors", in this case Highland regiment soldiers at the Battle of Waterloo (1815) by William Lockhart Bogle, 1893
David Wilkie's flattering portrait of the kilted King George IV