Books: Playing to the Gallery

In 2013, Grayson Perry became the first visual artist to present the BBC’s Reith Lectures. Rather than explain or interpret his own work, he chose this high-profile platform to give an insight into the inner workings of the art world.

Playing to the Gallery is closely based on the transcripts of the four lectures, with Perry’s engaging delivery transferring well to the printed page. The result is a small, wonderfully illustrated book full of humour and witty asides that nonetheless engages with important questions about how we produce, judge and consume contemporary art.

The book opens with a quest by Lynda Snell from BBC Radio 4’s The Archers to represent Ambridge among the 2,400 participants in Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth commission, One and Other.

For Perry, the reference to participatory art on the long-running radio soap opera perfectly represents the fact that contemporary art is no longer an elitist or minority interest, but instead is part of our mainstream cultural life.

Playing to the Gallery is directed at this mass audience – the five million-plus people who visit Tate Modern each year, but who may still at times find themselves perplexed by some of the art they encounter in there.

Perry’s own popularity and skill as a communicator finds him well placed to act as a guide to this audience. His success in the art world has been secured by making work that knowingly negotiates the invisible boundaries between craft and fine art.

His own ceramic pots are firmly categorised as fine art and, as such, are judged by the values and discourse of the contemporary art world.

Perhaps because his own career has been so strongly linked to how and why we ascribe value to objects, his attention as a commentator is so comfortably turned to the wider operations of the art world.

Open-ended art

The chapters in Playing to the Gallery directly mirror the subject and content of the four Reith Lectures. Perry begins by looking at the system that accords value to art; the way decisions taken by “the art world tribe” are balanced with the opinions of the wider public.

If exhibitions and collections were informed entirely by public taste, to what extent would they differ from what we have today? He outlines the complex social, professional and economic networks that operate to establish the artistic canon.

The next chapter uses Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and in particular his infamous urinal, Fountain, from 1917, to introduce the elasticity of the term “contemporary art”.

To make his point he uses a reductio ad absurdum by describing how the loyalist terrorist Michael Stone stormed the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2006 armed with a bag of homemade bombs, a gun and a knife, and then claimed in his legal defence that the incident was not intended to cause harm but instead was “a piece of performance art replicating a terrorist attack”.

To help with the open-endedness of what can be described as art, Perry then proceeds to lay down some markers to help establish some common ground about what may comfortably qualify.

In the spirit of the book’s irreverent tone, these markers are a combination of serious points and humorous asides, the latter eloquently represented by his “handbag-and-hipster test”, which states: “If there are lots of people with beards and glasses and single-speed bikes, or oligarchs’ wives with great big handbags looking a bit perturbed and puzzled by what they’re staring at, then it’s probably art.”

Love letter to the art world

The final chapter is the most personal, with the fourth Reith Lecture directed at an audience that included students from Central St Martins school of art.

Here he gives an account of his life as an artist and how he found meaning and identity through making art and becoming an artist. Perhaps this explains why Perry’s book is, by his own admission, “a love letter to the art world”.

This book has been written by someone who is now very much an insider and who has been hugely successful within the system that he describes.

As such, you would not turn to it for a detailed critique of the contemporary art world’s power structures. That said, serious points are covered, such as the delicate and ever-shifting power balance between the commercial and public sector.

But the real strength of the book is Perry’s personality and his wide experience of a world where he obviously still finds pleasure and meaning. It is this that makes Playing to the Gallery such an entertaining and engaging survival guide to the art world.

Nicholas Thornton is the head of fine art at Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales), Cardiff