This short book was inspired by visiting Grayson Perry's Vanity of Small Differences exhibition at Victoria Art Gallery in Bath a few weeks ago. The work itself is related to landscape only in terms of the very broad view that each of the tapestries has place as a core element at home: The Stadium of Light, a hunting lodge, scene at a road accident as the rags to riches life of Tim Rakewell (based on Hogarth's Tom Rakewell) are all examples of how place is integral to the unfolding story.
I bought the book out of interest following the exhibition and my limited knowledge of Perry as an unusual but thoughtful persona on Have I Got News for You:
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| Grayson Perry on Have I Got News for You |
The book is short - not much longer than a long magazine article - and divided into four chapters: Democracy Has a Bad Taste (examines what is quality); Beating the Bounds (what is art?); Nice Rebellion, Welcome In! (is there anything new in art?); I Found Myself in the Art World (being a contemporary artist). It is vaguely autobiographical. The middle two chapters are of particular interest
I set out below some of the points that I found most interesting. It is not intended as a general summary of the whole book:
Democracy Has a Bad Taste
Anyone can enjoy art. Artists are not in it for the money. People becoming more interested in modern art as witnessed by numbers attending Tata Modern.
Perry looks as what constitutes quality. Can art be popular as well as 'good'. Quotes Russian artists Koma and Melamid who in the 1990s commissioned polls to find out what people wanted most in art. The results were 'quite shocking' to Perry: people just wanted a nice landscape with a few figures; shades of my own preconception at the beginning of this section. I am not sure why Perry would find this shocking; people generally do not seek to be challenged in the way many would wish them to be. I am not just thinking art here, but also literature, politics, finance, social concerns. My wife and I have attended Edinburgh Fringe several times and remark each time how popular lowbrow comedy is compared to 'serious'stuff. Similarly, if we are subjected to enough paintings we will, apparently, begin to believe they are beautiful; familiarity breeds more then contempt' perhaps.
Some people might judge according to beauty; dangerous territory:
"Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided" (Marchel Duchamp)
Because beauty is subjective thing, we can look for more empirical methods to judge what is aesthetically pleasing. There is the golden ratio and even the Venetian Secret: a hoax that Benjamin West adopted and was mocked for so doing. Now, the market is the nearest thing to an empirical method of assessing art.
There are many judges of the value of art: dealers, collectors, artists, curators, the media, even the public. And there is a tension between those close to the subject (the first four above) and the rest of the populace: in order to appear important, different, trendy, in touch or whatever it is important to this elite group to differentiate, commonly using the unintelligible gobbledygook of what may be termed 'International Art English' (IAE), in particular IAE's use of nouns such as 'globality' or even 'experienceability'. This language is a surrogate for the lack of intellectual nature of much of artistic comment; a barrier put up deliberately to keep the proles out. Berger referred to this as I discussed when reviewing Ways of Seeing:
Beating the Bounds
"Now we are in a time of post historical art, anything can be art but not everything is art."
That is Perry's opening gambit. What is art was fairly uncontentious until modernism came along, and then Duchamp with his claim that anything can be art if the artist says it is. A group of Birmingham schoolboys ate some sweets that were actually a piece of art by Graham Fagen.
Perry argues there is snobbery beneath the tolerance of what is art:
"Some art is more equal than others.Like a urinal, bringing that into art, that's really radical. And a shark, bringing that into the gallery - oh, my God, that is an amazing thing. But a pot, now that's craft."
My sister-in-law makes superb hand-made cards. She sells some for a few quid at a time. They are clever but way off what we could call art because a) it is a common place pursuit; b) she has no desire to call her cards art. This is related to whether photography is art; for many such as myself, photography is a hobby; I am not in it to prove I am an artist.
Perry contends it the worry of the middlebrow: highbrow commentators can tolerate lowbrow because it adds 'zest and authenticity', but middlebrow has overtones of 'suburban bourgeoisie'. (see also my discussion of Bourdieu's The Social Definition of Photography).
Perry suggests the following 'boundary markers' as to what constitutes art:
- Is it in art context. Fischli and Weiss made Empty Room from items that were already in the gallery, a trompe l'œil of an installation in an installation. Everyday objects by definition became a work of art;
- Is is a boring version of something else?;
- Is it made by artist(s)? - 'there is no such thing as art, only artists' (Gombrich);
- Photography - it rains on us like sewage. If the subject is smiling, it probably is not art;
- Is it limited edition? Gursky got away with Rhein II as art because there were only five made;
- Handbag and hipster test: are there a lot of people looking at it?;
- Rubbish dump test - if you place a work of art on a rubbish dump, would someone walk past wonder why a work of art is being thrown away?;
- The computer art test - does it make us pause and think?
Perhaps the last is the most important in an ever-on society where gratification is sought and realised quickly and concentration spans are short.
Perry contends that the gallery is important ans a definer of what is art, because it is a clear place where one can visit in the knowledge that the works are at least intended to be art, else we have the ultimate democracy of everyone being an artist via the web. (Joseph Bueys)
Nice Rebellion, Welcome In!
Perry considers whether we have reached an 'endgame' in art, having reached the stage of 'omnidirectional experimentation'. If anything can be art, it is not possible to produce an artwork that is outside what is called art.
The remainder of the book is more philosophical about the future of art - becoming more pluralist - and an autobiographical context to becoming an artist.
Perry writes in an upbeat positive style. He is unpretentious, and, slightly mischievously, challenges those he considers to be so. His persona on Have I Got News for You is reflected in the book. He glides effortlessly between Renaissance oil paintings and urinals seeing art in all of this, and photography. His view of art in simple terms is not the what but the how; anything can be art but it needs to be in an artistic context; it was designed to be art. This seems reasonable - I can see how my photographs for example are not art - they are not designed to be so. The idea that somehow you have to make an effort by physically raising yourself from the computer screen, putting on a coat and going to a gallery is perhaps not quite right but I understand where Perry is coming from: the physical effort is a surrogate (or precursor perhaps) for the mental leap one has to take to think artistically. Fischli and Weiss' Empty Room is a classic example. Put anywhere other than a gallery, it cannot be a work of art; in an art gallery it might be. Abraham Cruzvillega' 240 soil filled planters in the Turbine Hall are another example. Put outside on the South Bank they would be decorative; a few metres away in a huge hall within an art gallery, they metamorphose into something quite different.
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| Soil filled planters at Tate Modern. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/12/tate-modern-cultivates-interest-latest-turbine-hall-show-abraham-cruzvillegas#img-2 |
So perhaps viewing something as work of art is a mindset: we have to get into 'artistic mode', to believe we are in the presence of something different from the mundane; if anything can be art, perhaps we have to define what is art as to how we view it.
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