Playing to the Gallery

by Grayson Perry

  Grayson Perry

  PLAYING TO THE GALLERY

  Helping contemporary art in its struggle to be understood

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  First published in Great Britain by Particular Books, 2014

  Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2015

  Copyright © 2014 by Grayson Perry

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 978-0-14-312892-2

  Cover art by Grayson Perry

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  How Much?!

  Democracy Has Bad Taste

  What is quality, how might we judge it, whose opinion counts, and does it even matter any more?

  Beating the Bounds

  What counts as art? Although we live in an era when anything can be art, not everything qualifies.

  Nice Rebellion, Welcome in!

  Is art still capable of shocking us or have we seen it all before?

  I Found Myself in the Art World

  How do you become a contemporary artist?

  The End

  Thanks

  About the Author

  How Much?!

  IT WAS ORIGINALLY RADIO 4 IN THE FORM OF The Archers, the BBC’s middle-England soap opera that has been running for over sixty years – not known as a hotbed of the avant-garde – that actually gave me the idea that contemporary art had now become mainstream.

  The watershed moment was when Lynda Snell, a self-appointed cultural ambassador to Ambridge, if you like, campaigned to try to get someone from Ambridge on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, when Antony Gormley was doing his ‘One and Other’ project. And I thought, if Lynda Snell is a fan of contemporary art, then the game is won, or lost, depending on how you look at it. If a piece of participatory performance art can feature prominently in a hugely popular and socially conservative radio drama, contemporary art is no longer a little back-water cult. It is now a part of mainstream cultural life.

  It’s easy to feel insecure around art and its appreciation, as though we cannot enjoy certain artworks if we don’t have a lot of academic and historical knowledge. But if there’s one message that I want you to take away it’s that anybody can enjoy art and anybody can have a life in the arts – even me! For even I, an Essex transvestite potter, have been let in by the art-world mafia.

  I want to ask – and answer! – the basic questions that might come up when we enter an art gallery and that some people might think are almost too gauche to ask. But I don’t! They might think they’re irrelevant, or that they’ve all been answered now, or that everybody already knows the answer. But I don’t think that’s true. The art world needs people to keep asking it questions, and thinking about those questions helps the enjoyment and understanding of art. I firmly believe that anyone is eligible to enjoy art or become an artist – any oik, any prole, any citizen who has a vision that they want to share. There is no social qualification, no quarter of society you need to belong to. With practice, with encouragement, with confidence, YOU can live a life in the arts. And this book offers up what I hope will be the basics of what you need in order to be able to do that. Though that is not to say it will be simple or that it will happen fast and in a convenient manner. Unlike shopping.

  Very few people enter the art world to make money; most do it because they are driven to make art, or they love to look at it or be around artists. This means they are often passionate, curious, sensitive types. Nice fun people! The art world offers a nice life. Come in! It’s not easy though, it’s not all wealth and celebrity and free booze. A lot of man-hours and heartache are involved but it’s a very rewarding and exciting place to hang out. Over the past twenty years or so a wider public is starting to realize this. I mean, take the Tate Modern. It’s the first- or second-most visited tourist destination in Britain and the fourth-most popular museum in the world, with 5.3 million visitors a year. Contemporary art exhibitions across the globe from the Centro Cultural Banco in Rio to the Reina Sofía in Madrid to the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane regularly draw hundreds of thousands of art lovers. Art is very popular, and yet many of us are still quite insecure around going into galleries. I still find commercial galleries in particular quite intimidating. There are frighteningly chic gallery girls on the front desk, acres of expensive, polished concrete, a reverential hush around arcane lumps of stuff, not to mention the language used around the art, which is often grandiloquently opaque.

  For somebody to walk into a contemporary art gallery for the first time and expect to understand it straight away would be like me walking into a classical music concert, knowing nothing about classical music, and saying, ‘Oh, it’s all just noise.’ We might be bemused or even angered by the work, but with a few of the right tools we might find that we understand and appreciate it. It can be tricky to get to the place where you can start to understand because, although you can intellectually engage with something quite quickly, to emotionally and spiritually engage takes quite a long time. You have to live with it. So bear that in mind.

  I also hope that, as a practising artist confronted with a blank sheet of paper or a lump of clay and having to literally make the decision of ‘What am I going to do?’ on a day-to-day basis, my approach to the questions of contemporary art will be a little different from that of a commentator on the art world. I work on the coalface of culture. Though nowadays, of course, we live in an era when we’re mainly a service economy, so perhaps really I should say that I work in the call centre of culture.

  Also as a practitioner, and not necessarily an expert in the wider sense, I can use autobiography as analysis – something that is often seen as a sin by many academics. I am going to extrapolate from my own personal experience to wider generalizations about the art world. And I hope that what follows will be of interest not just to anyone who encounters modern and contemporary art, but also to my fellow artists, dabbing and chipping away in their studios.

  Finally, what do I mean by the ‘art world’? Well, when I talk of the ‘art world’ I mean the culture surrounding the Western model of fine art, artefacts dealing with aesthetics or lack of them. I’m really talking about visual art, but as we shall find out later on not all of it is visual. I’m concerned with the stuff you usually encounter in museums like Tate Modern, or in commercial galleries all around London and the rest of the developed world. You may increasingly see this sort of art in collectors’ homes or in the street, in a hospital, on a round-about, at a live event or even in cyberspace. I’m also talking about the wider art world, its rituals and people, best experienced at exhibition openings, large commercial art fairs like Frieze in London or Basel, and at biennales like the century-old one held in Venice.

  By intent or by chance the regular citizenry increasingly come across the products of this often arcane and mischievous subculture I call the art world. As a tribal member of some thirty-five years’ standing, I wanted to reach out and attempt to explain some of the values and practices that shape something I love.

  These are all reasons why I’ve called this Playing to the Gallery and not, you may note, Sucking up to an Academic Elite.

  Democracy Has Bad Taste

  What is quality
, how might we judge it, whose opinion counts, and does it even matter any more?

  HISTORICALLY THE ART WORLD HAS BEEN fairly inward-looking because it can operate as a closed circle. In fact, I feel like the art world has a pretty tense relationship with popularity. The circle of artist, museum, critic, dealer and collector did not necessarily need the good opinion of the public. Now, I think that it’s different, and that popularity may affect the course of art history. Museums are still (just about) the powerhouses of the art world and they usually need visitor footfall to maintain their public funding. Increasingly the artist who can draw the crowds gets a better seat in the pantheon.

  Of course, there are still many artists who are very successful and who don’t need the public at all. For them, the closed circle of the artist, the dealer and the collector does the job. You don’t necessarily need the approval of a wider audience. An artist does not need the public to think his work is any good if they are not paying his wages or boosting his self-esteem. And this leads to the question of quality, which is one of the most burning issues around art: how do we tell if something is good? What are the criteria by which we judge art made today, and who tells us that it’s good? That’s perhaps even more important.

  Now there’s no easy answer for this one, I’m sorry to say. It’s often thought important – in any line of work – to have definite, strong opinions and be a certainty freak. But many of the methods of judging are very problematic and many of the criteria that are used to assess art are conflicting. I mean, we have financial value, popularity, art-historical significance and aesthetic sophistication. And all these things could be at odds with each other.

  If I look back, I really started thinking about the idea of quality in my second year at art college. At that time, 1980, it was almost de rigueur to have a dabble in performance art. Performance art being a live event often involving the artist as a performer. It was a thing you had to do, a little bit of performance art to, you know, cover the basics.

  So I did a little three-act performance. The first act was a chance for the audience to venerate me as a chastity-belt-wearing guru. The second was a lecture mocking the intellectual pretensions of some sections (Marxist) of the college and centred somewhat facetiously on the fact that ‘art’ was an anagram of ‘rat’. The third act was the announcement of the results of an election that I had been running in the previous week or so, to elect the best artist and lecturer in college. I put up a little ballot box in college, it was all democratic, and of course this was a very facetious act and the audience of course acted very facetiously in response and elected me as the best artist because they knew I was organizing it, and I won the prize, which was a big head that I’d made, a large papier-mâché carnival-style head. The first of many prizes in my glittering career.

  I learned two things from doing that performance. One was to have very low expectations of audience participation, and the other one was that judging quality is a very tricky area. A lecturer said to me afterwards, ‘It was entertaining, but I’m not sure it was good art.’

  In organizing an election at college I was being mischievous as even then I realized that quality judgement was a complex business; being popular did not mean you were of good quality. In fact, within the art world, they often seem to be almost at odds with each other.

  Take the most popular art exhibition in Britain and the fifth-most popular in the world in 2012: the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy. It was called ‘A Bigger Picture’, with those huge, joyful landscape paintings, and it was a paying show, people had to hand over money to go. Soon after it opened I was talking to a senior contemporary art gallery director (a free-to-enter, publicly funded institution, I should mention) and she said she thought the Hockney was one of the worst shows she’d ever seen. And I don’t think she was alone. It’s as though having such a popular exhibition isn’t to the taste of someone whose job it is to advance the taste of people in this country. So the large audience and its tastes are often a bane to those who wish to expand the field of what is thought of as good art by the public. There’s a bit of a catch in that.

  Now there were two very mischievous and funny Russian artists called Komar and Melamid in the middle of the 1990s. They took this whole idea of popularity literally and they commissioned polls in several different countries to find out what people wanted most in art. Then, when they’d got the results of these surveys (which were conducted by professional pollsters), they painted the paintings in accordance with the results. And the results were quite shocking. In nearly every country, all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue. It’s quite depressing. After the experience they said, ‘In looking for freedom, we found slavery.’

  (The recent exhibition of L. S. Lowry at Tate Britain could be seen as a capitulation to popular uproar. Lowry has long been seen, probably mistakenly, as the poster boy of popular versus elitist taste in art and there was much complaining that his work was rarely hung. The Tate brought in respected, heavyweight art critics T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner to curate the show to add intellectual lustre to his popular appeal. Whether this will elevate Lowry’s repetitive output to the credibility level of, say, Rothko’s repetitive output remains to be seen.)

  So a visitor to an exhibition, like the Hockney exhibition, if they were judging the quality of the art, they might use a word like ‘beauty’. Now if you use that kind of word in the art world, be very careful. There will be a sucking of teeth and a mournful shaking of heads because their hero artist, Marcel Duchamp (he of urinal fame), said ‘aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided’. To judge a work on its aesthetic merit is to buy into some discredited, fusty hierarchy, tainted with sexism, racism, colonialism and class privilege. It’s loaded, this idea of beauty, because where does our idea of beauty come from?

  Proust said something to the effect that ‘we only see beauty when we’re looking through an ornate gold frame’. What he meant was that our idea of what is beautiful is entirely conditioned: things we regard as beautiful do not possess some innate quality of beauty, we have just become used to regarding something as beautiful through exposure and reinforcement. Beauty is very much about familiarity, reinforcing an idea we have already. It’s a constructed thing built up on shifting layers. We can make something a touch more beautiful just by the very act of exclaiming to a friend, ‘Wow, that is beautiful!’ Or when we go on holiday and all we really want to do is take the photograph that we’ve seen in the brochure. You want to be on Machu Picchu on your own in perfect sunshine. Family, friends, education, nationality, race, religion and politics – all these things help shape our idea of beauty.

  We may feel, like the critic Clement Greenberg, that ‘You can no more choose whether to like a work of art or not than you can choose for sugar to taste sweet or lemons sour.’ But unlike the taste buds on our tongue our aesthetic taste buds can change.

  When we talk about the culture we consume it is often a dance around how we wish to be seen: what we enjoy reflects on who we are. I always cringe when I hear myself having a ‘oh you must hear this’ moment, when I want to share my current musical taste with a friend. He is obliged to listen to it and I fear rejection of my very soul. It is always safer to slag something off than eulogize it.

  That worrying about what others will think about our aesthetic choices is a part of the self-consciousness that is in the DNA of modernism. By ‘modernism’ I mean the 100 years of art leading up to, say, the 1970s. A time when artists were questioning and worrying about what it was that they were doing; they weren’t just being swept along by tradition or belief. Self-consciousness, though, is crippling for an artist. As a schoolboy, I liked Victorian narrative painting and since then I’ve had to go through all sorts of contortions to justify my liking of this. I like paintings by William Powell Frith, and George Elgar Hicks, and why do I like them? Because they’re very English, lovely craftsmanship, social history, good frocks.

&n
bsp; And I went through all kinds of twists and turns to justify my liking of these as the years went by. Early on I was a re-adopter and I would say, ‘Oh, they’re modern in their own time’ and ‘I like them in an ironic way’ and ‘They’re almost exotic now’, and then I would say, ‘Oh, they’re unashamedly popular.’ And then all of a sudden they were becoming popular again, in a fashionable, in-crowd kind of way. And I thought, ‘Oh no, I’ve no longer got kooky taste. It’ll just look like I’m jumping on the bandwagon, liking Victorian narrative painting.’

  Or, when I was thirteen, I liked photorealist painting because I could easily appreciate its skill. I learned at art school that it was a bit naff. I rode this out and, after forty years looking at art, I still like photorealism by artists such as Richard Estes, but perhaps now for its lyrical qualities and only when framed in authenticity by 1960s art history.

  I have made a study of taste and much of what I found can be applied to our taste in art. The difference might be that in the post-nineteenth-century art world it is by necessity a hideously more self-conscious process. Our job as artists or curators is discriminating, whether between colours and forms and materials, or ideas, artists and eras. When someone buys curtains they may go with the ones they ‘like’ but they do not necessarily interrogate themselves about what ‘like’ might mean. But that sort of self-consciousness is a defining aspect of being an artist today, examining not just what to make and how, but what is this business called art? So you can see how difficult it is, the role of the artist.

  As an artist, the ability to resist peer pressure, to trust one’s own judgement, is vital, but it can be a lonely and anxiety-inducing procedure. In those discomfiting moments of uncertainty this is when the ‘baloney generator’ kicks in. This is what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker called the part of our mind that cannot stand not knowing, not understanding fully, so when confronted with a soft problem like ‘What is good art?’ our mind starts generating baloney to cover its discomfort.