I do think that you’ve got to take every opportunity as a young artist or a designer. If somebody offers you some little exhibition or a small part in a group show or any tiny opportunity, you take it. You take it because you never know. Every artist you know who’s successful will probably trace their career back to some small event that was fairly insignificant, but that event led them to meet someone, and so on and so on. I had a show and then someone from a museum bought one of my pieces very cheap. It got put into the basement and was then discovered by a curator when they did a show, and then I had a bigger show, and so it began.
You also have to let yourself go to be creative and allow the ridiculous things to happen. One of my favourite quotes about creativity is from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He says ideas are like little furry creatures coming out of the undergrowth and you’ve got to be nice to the first one. Because that ridiculous idea you’re having, suddenly that’s your next ten years of really serious money-making work. People go, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to have an important idea for this exhibition.’ I don’t know if that’s the right way to go about it. My technique, for example, is to drink beer and watch X Factor and get my felt pens out.
There is a boundary between being a student and becoming an artist. What this boundary is made of I am not sure. I think it is about identity. At some party someone will ask you what you do, and you will reply, ‘I’m an artist.’ You have to summon up the courage to say it. You may not have total confidence in that reply but you have crossed a boundary. You have started out on the hazardous path. At this point I may risk a dark sincerity. I feel it is a noble thing to be an artist. You’re a pilgrim on the road to meaning. This is the central motif of my proudest achievement, which was my show at the British Museum,
The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.
A conversation I had with the gallerist Sadie Coles many years ago has really stuck with me. I asked her, ‘What do you look for when you’re looking for artists to bring into the gallery?’ and she said, ‘Commitment! Commitment to being an artist!’
Most of the successful artists I’ve met are very disciplined. They turn up on time, they put in the hours. That idea of us all being a bit chaotic and shaky, it’s a myth. Artists are doers! They don’t want to be artists, they want to make art. They enjoy making art. As I often say, this reminds me of a quote from Kierkegaard: ‘In the old days, they loved wisdom. Nowadays they love the title “philosopher”.’
But as my reputation grew in the 1980s and 1990s my earnings passed a point when I thought, ‘I’m no longer in the realm of an appropriate wage for a skilled labourer.’ Prices started to get into this airy-fairy whatever-anybody-will-pay-for-it arena. I had attained what I now dub ‘Picasso Napkin syndrome’, after the artist’s fabled ability to pay for expensive meals just by drawing on the table linen. This is a version of the Midas touch: everything I doodle on or even just sign suddenly has financial value. This is a dangerous blessing for an artist and many have abused it. The temptation to churn out work in one’s signature style to satisfy collector demand is very strong. Anything you sign is worth money! Artists like Andy Warhol literally did that. He would just sign a dollar bill and then suddenly it would be worth $100. Nowadays they are worth several thousand dollars!
Marcel Duchamp said, ‘I could have made a hundred thousand ready-mades in ten years, easily, and they would have all been fake. Abundant production can only result in mediocrity.’
By now, we’ve been chugging along in our art career for a while and we’ve somehow managed to keep that burning, precious, childlike glimmer of creativity burning, and people might think that I find being an artist easy, relaxing even. When I’m at a party, they ask me, ‘What do you do?’ and I say, ‘Oh, I’m an artist.’ And they go, ‘It must be fun! What fun that must be – all that sculpting, pottery. Must be great fun!’ And I go, ‘Imagine this.’ I say, ‘Imagine this. You know, big museum, big museum. They’ve offered you an exhibition and there’s a big room there – an open white room waiting for you to fill it. And in a year or two I’ve got to fill that with work and all the people are going to come and look at it, maybe thousands of people, and all the press are going to come and they’ll want to write about it and talk about it, and then I’ve got to sell it. And the reaction of certain people – well, my income depends on it. And maybe the income of several other people, assistants and people working at the gallery. And then on top of that, I’ve got to create it with the carefree joy of a child! Does that sound like pure fun?’ Art, it’s a serious business!
One thing I’m glad about is that in kicking the can down the road of my career, somehow, I have indeed found myself.
All artists carry within themselves, in their own way, an indistinct glowing ball of creative energy that they have to nurse through the assault course of becoming and growing as an artist. This is a tender cargo many artists, myself included, find it hard to talk about because we move around in the atmosphere of the art world, which is often very caustic – corrosive to such a delicate organism as one’s creative drive. I protect my ball of creative energy. I protect it with a shield made of jaded irony, a helmet of mischief and a breastplate of facetiousness. And I wield my carefully crafted blade of cynicism. Because the part of myself that keeps me working year after year is too vulnerable to expose fully to the glare of the world.
I have a list of banned words that includes ‘passionate’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘profound’, all words it would be easy to reach for when describing the thing that keeps me making art. But the motivation is tender and it needs to be protected from clichés. (I have a particularly acute allergy to clichés because my mother ran off with the milkman.)
I came across this woman called Jennifer Yane. I don’t know who she is, but she had this quote. It was, ‘Art is spirituality in drag.’
I’m not going to say it, but it kind of describes what you’re looking at when you look at art. It’s a way of accessing spirituality almost by stealth – being tricked into all the colour and loveliness of the art. We look at it and suddenly we’re having spiritual moment. But, like I say, I’m not allowed to talk …
The metaphor that best describes what it’s like for my practice as an artist is that of a refuge, a place inside my head where I can go on my own and process the world and its complexities. It’s an inner shed in which I can lose myself.
The psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz writes of a patient who was always talking about a house he was planning and renovating in France and how it was such an absorbing and enjoyable project, thinking about how he was going to decorate it and arrange the furniture, that he would always turn to it in his mind when life got too much. It was very relaxing for him to think about these marvellous plans he had for his house in France. And then, at the end of his course of psychotherapy, just as he was leaving, he turned and he said, ‘You do know, don’t you, Mr Grosz, that there is no house in France? You do know that?’
I completely crack up at that because it really echoes with me, that place where he goes: his refuge where he’s an artist.
The End
I HAVE HAD GREAT FUN THINKING ABOUT these issues, which reflects the enormous fun I have had over the decades being part of the art world. In some ways this book is a love letter to the art world. If I have been teasing (bullying) it is because I know the art world can take it, in fact it encourages it. None of my jibes stop the great art being awesomely beautiful. I often count my blessings that I am in a business where I am duty-bound to seek out and look for beauty. I am also grateful that I embarked on a career that, unlike music, literature or journalism, has not experienced so much economic and technological upheaval because of the internet. In fact it seems that, in the digital age, people are keener than ever to visit art galleries, to be in the presence of the actual unique object (and take a selfie in front of it, natch, to post on Twitter), and there are more artists, dealers, collectors and curators than ever.
A big part of my m
otivation for doing anything creative is to pass on the stimulation and pleasure I have had from observing the world and making the artefact. If I have in some way enhanced your next visit to a ‘fine-art context’ I am overjoyed. If you are still unsure how to react when confronted with a work of contemporary art, try a thought exercise I often fall back on. Imagine the conversation that would ensue if a punter brought the artwork, in a century or so, to be appraised on some twenty-second-century edition of Antiques Roadshow. Works for me!
And so here we are, at the end of the book. I’ve tried to answer some of the fundamental, obvious questions about the art world. I’ve not done this to expose the workings as some kind of trick, like ripping the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz, but because I think people might be intrigued by these things. I did it so that people like the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Lion might enter the Emerald City of the art world a little smarter, a little braver and a little fonder.
Thank you for coming with me.
Thanks
Gwyneth Williams
Hugh Levinson
Jim Frank
Mohit Bakaya
Sue Lawley
Dr Sarah Thornton
Prof Charlie Gere
Mick Finch and fine art students at Central Saint Martin’s
Karen Wright
Martin Gayford
Polly Robinson Gaer
Louisa Buck
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Martin Parr
Jaquie Drewe
Karolina Sutton
The Victoria Miro Gallery
About the Author
Grayson Perry’s first art prize was a large papier-mâché head he awarded himself as part of a performance art project at college in 1980. Since then he has won many other awards, including the Turner Prize in 2003. He is now one of Britain’s most celebrated artists and has had major solo exhibitions all over the world. His 2013 BBC Reith Lectures were the most popular lectures since the series began. He won a BAFTA for his Channel 4 documentary on the creation of six new tapestries entitled ‘The Vanity of Small Differences, All in the Best Possible Taste’, for which he was also awarded Best Presenter at the Grierson British Documentary Awards.
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!
Playing to the Gallery Page 8