The Reith Lectures 2013

Playing to the Gallery by Grayson Perry.

I have been following the career of Grayson Perry since the very moment I saw him on television in the early nineties.  I was a schoolgirl, attending a convent school in a Cheshire village and contemporary art was not part of my life.
I saw Grayson Perry, as Claire, accepting the Turner Prize (of which I had never heard) and a different side of what might be sensible appeared to me.  It wasn't a conscious decision to follow Mr Perry and it is only in recent years that I have gone out of my way to seek out his work, his exhibitions, but whenever he was mentioned I was interested.
He is a fascinating man.  He has the confident authority of most successful artists, but he always seems to be lacking the arrogance of many of his peers.  He might be odd, he might be married to his psychoanalyst, he might be many things, but I believe that he is a fascinating and humorous man ans I was was delighted when I heard he would be giving this year's series of Reith Lectures.


The following is not a transcript of the lectures but a summary of what I gain from listening to them.

1. Democracy has bad taste.

Grayson Perry inhabits the Art World.  As an artist and  lecturer and commentator on contemporary arts, he does not consider himself an expert but must indeed be a close approximation.
As an insider of the this rarefied world and in giving these lectures he tries to encourage people to engage with physical places where art is to be to found and to be comfortable.
Speaking primarily with regard to the visual arts, Grayson Perry considers museums, commercial galleries and the more introspective, historical artist-dealer-collector relationship.  He dissects the 5.3million visitors per annum to the Tate Modern, one of the U.K.s most popular tourist destinations.  These visitors have been split into categories, some of whom, Grayson argues, would be impossible to keep away and these include the 'Urban Arts Eclectic' and the 'Mature Explorers', but he addresses himself to the 36% of visitors categorised as 'Dinner and a Show' or 'Fun, Fashion and Friends'.
During the discourse, Insider, Mr Perry, recognises the intimidating nature of the gallery environment and tries to address this by providing the imagined visitor with a methodology of approaching the art to which they will be exposed and how to judge it on an alien scale of merit.

The issues of judging art and of  deciding upon its quality are addressed as one and the same things, in most respects.  For example the popularity of a piece of art does not mean it is of quality but an historically significant piece or one of aesthetic sophistication may become very popular and therefore valuable and will inevitably be of quality.
As humans looking at art we will all have many similar responses and many of these can be cultural.  Several Russian artists surveyed the preferences of the public, across several countries, as regards contemporary art and discovered that most people prefer the colour blue.  This is of course of no help to anyone but it is interesting nevertheless.

There is a language which surrounds the discussion of art which may be alienating to the general public and also unhelpful to artists themselves. An analysis of the website of art gallery press releases E Flux showed it contained very few nouns; Art English.  This is a In the hundred years leading up to the 1970s, Grayson Perry argued, art became very self-conscious.  This could prove debilitating to artists and being such a subjective problem it has led to the search for an empirical way to prove Quality in art (such as The Venetian Secret Hoax).

Clement Greenberg stated that art is always tied to money, as a luxury item this is hard to dispute.  The more expensive a work of art, the more renowned it becomes and therefore the more influential.  Strangely, Perry notes, that in the gallery situation, pieces are often priced according to their size, although this factor is removed by the time the work reaches the secondary market.

So, if the value of a work of art is an unreliable indicator of its quality, what remains?
Here Perry raises the important issue of Validation.  As a scientific paper undergoes peer review before journal publication, so a work of art is first validated by peer review before being placed in a gallery.  The status of this gallery is of great importance and is enhanced by Validation from serious critics and then collectors and dealers, dealers themselves being one of the important factors in this process as their reputation dictates the placing of the work for sale and the likelihood of it being picked up by a serious collector, thus adding kudos to the work of the artist.
Finally the public have the chance to Validate the work.  Numbers of visitors to a show are measurable and an important source of information available to curators, perhaps one of the single most important.  Gallery and museum curators decide what goes onto display to the general public and this over time should help to stabilise the prices for an artist, thus giving collectors more confidence in their investments.  With humour, Perry notes that bank vaults are stuffed with Silver, Wine, Art and Gold (S.W.A.G.).

To finish this study of quality and validation, Grayson Perry, notes that Political Art is largely outside of this process.  If the message is agreed with by enough people, they will enjoy the message of the art.  It is interesting to consider how many artists keep their political and artistic endeavours entirely separate.  He ends this first lecture with a quote from Alan Bennett "you don't have to like it all".