Playing to the Gallery

by Grayson Perry

  This very unsettling, subjective nature of beauty has prompted people to look for a more empirical explanation of what we find aesthetically pleasing. This, I think, is folly. I like to quote the philosopher John Gray: ‘If belief in human rationality were a scientific theory it long since would have been falsified and abandoned.’

  In a recent set of studies the psychologist James Cutting demonstrated that merely exposing people to certain images means they form a preference for those same images. In a series of experiments using photographs of impressionist paintings he found his subjects preferred the ones they had been exposed to more regularly even compared to very similar or even more famous images. His conclusion was that the more frequent broadcast of certain images via books, newspapers, magazines or television helps maintain what is seen as the canon in our culture. If we constantly see pictures by artists like Degas, Renoir or Monet in a context of high-cultural capital we cannot help but find them beautiful. Apparently.

  It may not be that simple though. In another experiment psychologists showed works by the nineteenth-century master Millais next to work by hyper-popular but critically panned American kitsch painter Thomas Kincade. After repeated exposure the people in the study formed a measurable preference for the old masters. Maybe the experiment had found evidence that there might be innate formal qualities that we respond to in art. Maybe repeated exposure to good art makes us like it more and the opposite happens with bad art.

  There are so many variables in such experiments that I remain a sceptic. Over the centuries many people have become attached to empirical explanations of what makes a great work of art. The ancient Greeks discovered the golden ratio, said to produce pleasing aesthetic harmony. William Hogarth, the painter, had his serpentine line of beauty, which he used to put into his paintings thinking this was a way of ensuring that each painting would be a beautiful thing. My favourite attempt at a recipe for a masterpiece is called the ‘Venetian Secret’. Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy of Arts in about 1796, was hoaxed by someone who said they had found the ‘Venetian Secret’. This was a mythical thing that Titian and the Venetian painters of the Renaissance used: a formula for painting the ideal beautiful painting. Somebody brought this old letter to Benjamin West and he believed it was real, and he started painting paintings in this formula, hoping it would work, and he was mocked hideously in the press for doing it.

  But I feel some sympathy with the guy. I did a bit of research myself and I have found the formula that guarantees success in the contemporary art world. It is:

  And there you have it, the ideal formula for art in the twenty-first century. Because of course the nearest thing we have to an empirical measure of art is the market. By this reckoning Cézanne’s Card Players is the most beautiful, lovely painting in the world. I find it a little bit clunky kitsch but that’s me. $260 million it’s worth.

  Monetary value is not what makes an artwork important of course but it often trumps all other meanings because people are easily impressed by huge sums of money. Much hoo-ha can be raised when a drawing – not even a painting – of Munch’s Scream goes for $120 million.

  Cynics may say that actually art is indeed now only an asset class, that it has lost its other roles, it’s no longer about story-telling or mass communication or pushing boundaries. It’s just big, lumpen loads of cash sitting on walls. And of course the opposite argument – it’s art for art’s sake – is a very idealist position to take because integrity does not pay the bills. Clement Greenberg, a famous art critic in the 1950s, said that art will always be tied to money by an umbilical cord of gold. So I’m fairly pragmatic about it. One of my favourite quotes is that you’ll never have a good art career unless your work fits into the elevator of a New York apartment block.

  And yet when a commercial gallery is setting up its show and it’s pricing the art, it doesn’t price works by quality, it usually prices the pieces by size. A big painting will cost more than a small painting. I suppose there’s a curious logic to that. It doesn’t mean that the big painting is better. In my experience an artist’s biggest work is very rarely their best. So at the secondary market, the auction, all this comes out in the wash and the good painting will always get the highest price even if it’s a tiny little one.

  There are other measures of quality that I find funny. Philip Hook, who works for Sotheby’s, said red paintings will always sell best, followed by white, blue, yellow, green and black. But of course it’s not just any old red painting that will make the highest prices. The very fact that an artwork has reached the auction block of a house like Sotheby’s means it’s by an artist who has already been validated.

  This is a crux point when thinking about quality. Validation is the key point to understanding how some art is regarded as better than other art – at least within a large part of the art world, including most museums and galleries and roundabouts. The key to validation is to understand who is doing the validating, who is bestowing their good opinion, their money, their attention and time, who is giving value to certain artists and works of art. The cast of characters in this drama is large: artists, collectors, teachers, dealers, critics, curators, the media, oh, and even maybe the public.

  What they form is this lovely consensus around what is good art. I did a pot once called Lovely Consensus. I asked my dealer for the top fifty names of people and institutions where I should hope my work would end up, almost like the perfect CV, and I wrote them on to this pot in a decorative way and it was in my show for the Turner Prize, and one of the names on that pot was a very famous art collector called Dakis Joannou and he saw the pot and bought it over the phone while he was looking at it in the Tate Gallery. So that’s just as an aside, a little tip for any artist. What you might want to do is write the names of famous collectors on the side of your work.

  Now Sir Alan Bowness, a director of the Tate, said there were four stages to validation: peers; then serious critics; then collectors and dealers; and then the public. It’s a little bit more complicated than that nowadays. Of course it’s still very important to be recognized. Validation from your peers is a lovely accolade to have. When I first started making pottery, my artist friends used to look at them and go, ‘Pottery?!’ And then they went, ‘Yeah! Pottery, I get that. Yeah.’ For quite a while I was ‘an artist’s artist’, i.e., poor.

  The days when a critic like Clement Greenberg could make or break artists are over. The good opinion of art writers is nice and every artist could probably quote their worst review word-perfect, but the press is now one of the multitude of voices in the art world.

  Another member of that cast of validating characters is the collector. As an artist you always want the heavyweight collector to buy your work because it gives the work kudos. In the 1990s Charles Saatchi simply had to put his foot over the threshold of your exhibition and that was it. The media was agog and he would come in and hoover up all the pieces.

  But of course being part of a prestigious collector’s haul will not save mediocre work. On the flip side, collectors can also buy respectability with their art. Their wealth may come from dodgy sources, but buy blue-chip or difficult, culturally high-status art, and their image is polished just like the patrons of the past burnished their image paying for chapels in the grand cathedrals.

  Art dealers, they’re the next part of the chorus of validation.

  A good art dealer can have a powerful effect on an artist’s reputation just by association and inclusion in a reputable stable of talent. An emerging talent can benefit from showing at the same gallery as an established name. In 2012 I saw a show by yet-to-graduate Eddie Peake at the mega-gallery White Cube. He was showing alongside respected, mid-career Gary Hume and ageing modern master Chuck Close. The kudos can rub off in different ways: commercial galleries often find it hard to monetize artists who do very political performance art or mount vast installations or film a stomach-churning video. But the edgy cred of these artists can dilute the accusation that the gallery
is just a glossy shop for mega branded goods.

  The dealer also controls where your work may go, making sure works are ‘placed’ with respected collections. Public institutions are usually given a hefty discount because they are the preferred location for a work and they usually don’t have as much money as the private sector. A good dealer will discreetly vet collectors and refuse to sell to those who are tacky (you don’t want a tacky collector) or have a reputation for ‘flipping’ art. Flipping is buying a difficult-to-obtain work then reselling it at auction for a profit soon after. Dealers have a very powerful effect on the reputation of the artist in their placing of the work. This is a slightly mysterious process that many people don’t quite understand: a dealer will choose where your work goes so it gains the brownie points, the buzz around it then goes up. Collectors who are rejected, who perhaps don’t have the brownie points to give out, can get quite annoyed.

  Good dealers play a vital role in not just selling the works but promoting and contextualizing the artist. The major art fairs are nowadays a major arena for art, they’ve become a new validator, and they often prefer to include dealers who have an ongoing programme of exhibitions, who contribute to the validation process in an active way, and are not just, ahem, shops.

  And then of course the next group of people we might think about in deciding what is good art is the public. Since the mid-1990s we’ve seen a lot more about contemporary artists in the papers and on the telly. Exposure of an artist in the media and the resulting fame is seen as tacky by many highbrow types; they don’t think it should influence the validation process, they think being popular is a dodgy quality in art. But museums need visitor numbers, as visitor numbers are in a way another empirical measure of quality, and a well-known and popular name has increasing currency. The Art Newspaper, the periodical for those in the art business, publishes a special supplement every year dedicated only to visitor figures, such is their importance. If loads of people come to a show, that’s a measurable fact, and of course it justifies their funding.

  When I won the Turner Prize, having been cloistered in the art world for more than twenty years, I was quite dismissive of the effect it’d have on my career. Ten years on I have changed my mind.

  Today perhaps the greatest accolade you can give a work of art is to say it is of ‘museum quality’. In another time the most powerful giver-outers of brownie points were the commissioners, who were literally the king, or the pope, and then the aristocrats and the generally wealthy. But today, at the top of the tree of the validation cast, it’s probably the curators. Willi Bongard, a German art critic, called them the ‘popes of art’, and such is the power of the curators that they are bound by a code of ethics that says they mustn’t themselves collect, buy for their own private collection, work which is in the field that they are overlooking in their professional life. Because they are then in a position of very great power. I mean, they could, if they bought a certain artist, then say, ‘Oh, I think we should do a show of X at the museum.’ And then, ‘It’s funny how the prices of X have gone up since the Tate Modern put that show on.’

  I like to think the validation process is self-correcting to a certain extent. If the glitzy collectors are buying someone up and it’s all shiny and lovely and the works are just being parked in arms dealers’ houses, then the cool eye of academe will maybe go, ‘Oh, I don’t know about X now. This is getting a little bit cheesy.’ And then if the academy is a bit too dry and heavy and it’s all so bloody worthy, the work will a) go unsold, and b) go unvisited because probably in all honesty it’s a bit dull. And, of course, God help you if you’re popular with the general public.

  By each of these encounters the cast of validators bestows upon the work and the artist a layer of patina that gradually builds into a reputation. All these hundreds of little conversations and reviews and series of good prices over time, these are the filters that pass a work of art through into the canon. The art that ends up, today, in a public gallery didn’t get there by public vote. It’s been through a series of juries – unofficial juries at private views and sales and fairs around the world – it’s been given the right nods and the knowing winks. This consensus is very necessary as there aren’t many people in the art world who have the confidence of a totally fresh good eye: people who can look at a work and see high quality in it without listening to the consensus or even reading the name on the label. And it can be very hard on artworks, the weight of that consensus. If you go to the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa, you’re so built up because it’s the most famous artwork in the world that it’s inevitably going to disappoint. But if you just walked in on it, you’d go, ‘Wow, that’s an amazing painting.’

  Of course, whether the reputation that’s built up lasts or not is another matter. Francesco Bonami, who curated the Venice Biennale in 2003, described something he called ‘Duane Hanson syndrome’, after the artist famous for his super-realistic figures. He said, ‘I have this theory that some art – which is not a matter of importance in the moment that they’re being done – but that some artworks accumulate dust, and some others, patina. So I think Duane Hanson accumulated a lot of dust. When you see sculptures that belong to a particular moment, they have been important, but now they are dusty. They have no patina.’

  For the successful artist, eventually a consensus builds, hopefully one that is tested continuously in all different contexts. But what is the essence of this consensus? What is this patina that accumulates on art? In a way you want to boil down this lovely thing that all these people are bestowing on this artwork, this thing that anoints it with the quality that we all want. In many ways what it boils down to is seriousness. That’s the most valued currency in the art world. When I won the Turner Prize, one of the press people, one of the first questions they asked me, was ‘Grayson, are you a loveable character or are you a serious artist?’

  I said, ‘Can’t I be both?’ For all my jokes, as an artist what I desire is to be taken seriously. I have a horror of becoming trendily fashionable because then there’s the inevitability of becoming unfashionable. Seriousness is different. One of the ways seriousness is bestowed and protected is through language. Ethnographer Sarah Thornton, in her book Seven Days in the Art World, quotes an Art Forum editor (Art Forum being the magazine of record in the art world) saying that because a previous editor didn’t have English as a first language, the magazine suffered from the wrong kind of unreadability during her tenure. But the art world is often scared of everyday clarity. Here’s a paragraph from a wall text I copied down in the Venice Biennale in 2011:

  A Common Ground is based on the fact that affectivity remains a central access in contemporary Uruguayan artistic production. This exhibition puts forward two seemingly antithetical notions of this idea. On the one hand Magela Ferrero’s personal diary, a written and visual work in progress, and on the other, the discourse and meta-discourse about language in Alejandro Cesarco’s constant need to shed light on what it has said (and not said), multiplying the winks, quotes, repetitions and versions of his favourite subject matters.

  Who knows what this means! Alix Rule, a sociologist, and David Levine, an artist, fed the texts of thousands of press releases for contemporary art shows in public institutions through a language-analysing program and they came up with a few observations about what they called ‘International Art English’. ‘International Art English rebukes ordinary English for its lack of nouns. Visual becomes visuality. Global becomes globality. Potential becomes potentiality. And experience of course becomes experienceability.’ They describe the metaphysical seasickness you get from reading this sort of text, where it all sounds a bit like inexpertly translated French.

  Now this International Art English began in the 1960s in art criticism, it enhanced the authority of some writers to evaluate art and, as we have read, this is a precious capability to have. It became the language of seriousness; it bestowed a patina of complexity on artworks. It prompted a linguistic arms race, spreading like wi
ldfire because everybody wanted to be thought of as being very serious about the art. It spread to institutions, commercial galleries, even students’ dissertations. They all realized the power of this elite global language, and adopted it so they too might be worth listening to about things that are worth seeing. This is the language of a mobile, finger-on-the-pulse, international culture broker, what art historian and critic Sven Lütticken calls ‘Highbrow Copywriting’.

  The very impenetrability of IAE means that a non-fluent speaker might question their own judgements as not being educated enough. They might think you need to understand this in order to pass judgement. I just want to tell you now, you don’t.

  That feeling that we need to fully ‘understand’ an artwork before judging it is particularly strong when dealing with conceptual art, where a lot of the works are little more than support systems or stage sets upon which prompts for ideas are played out. A judgement of the work on aesthetic grounds seems inappropriate. Conceptual art seemed a modest, self-effacing affair in the 1970s, consisting of typed sheets of text and small black-and-white photographs, things made of scrap wood, string and tape. The version we saw emerge in the 1990s seemed to have been run through an advertising agency (literally in some cases). It was sexier, funnier, bigger and – most important of all – more saleable.

  In the 1960s pop art was about the idea of consumerism but it still looked like traditional art in some ways. Today a lot of the headline artists such as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami have developed a brand of art that is luxurious in its finishes, accessible in its imagery, and mind-boggling in its prices. These artworks are consumer goods. These artists unashamedly embrace consumerism and employ large numbers of staff. Takashi Murakami has over 100 assistants. He had a big show at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles and he actually had a real Louis Vuitton shop in the gallery, selling handbags, as part of the exhibition. He called that his version of Duchamp’s urinal, meaning that by including an actual LV shop in the show he had passed through a boundary like Duchamp did with his fountain. He was saying, ‘Yeah, I make stuff and I flog it.’ He was utterly unembarrassed about it.