“Playing to the Gallery”: Grayson Perry and the (in)accessibility
of the Art World
Delivering the first of his 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, Grayson
Perry , one of Britain’s most visible and – certainly – most beloved artists,
reminded his audience, to raucous applause, that his series of lectures were to
be entitled ‘Playing to the Gallery’
and not ‘Sucking up to an Academic Elite’.
This mischievous jibe at the artists, learned academicians and cultural and
intellectual institutions that we shall here refer to as the ‘Art World’ is
symbolic of what has so endeared Perry to the general public, a kicking back
against an establishment that can, at best, be said to seek a certain
intellectual distinction from the masses and, at worst, be said to actively and
deliberately alienate or baffle them. Does it matter, then, that Perry’s
comments come from a man who is a self-admittedly “paid-up member of the art establishment”? Perhaps not. A fervid dismissive
of the notion that the opportunity to appreciate and enjoy art should be
exclusive, Perry has become the acceptable face of contemporary art, while
retaining his subversive edge. Never patronizing or purposefully oblique, he is
instead friendly, witty, punchy and self-deprecating; in short, everything that
contemporary art is often not. This essay considers some of the ways in which
the contemporary Art World may appear unavailable to the everyman, and the role
of Perry, now such an embedded fixture in the cultural landscape of the nation,
as the antithesis to this elitism.
Grayson Perry occupies a unique place in the British
collective consciousness. Both as an artist – his exhibitions tend to be
sell-out successes – and as a maker of some of the most applauded and
thought-provoking television in recent memory, he seems able to break down
barriers of communication in a way that contemporary artists seldom seem to.
The accessibility of Perry’s discourse is a rarity in a cultural field that is
often dense and unhelpfully lacking in clarity. In truth, the language of The
Art World is, quite literally, foreign. In 2011, Alix Rule, a sociologist and
linguist , and David Levine, a graphic designer, embarked upon an experiment,
supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, to analyse the
unique lexical, grammatical and stylistic tics of an increasingly
internationalised Art World. Rule and
Levine believed the purest articulation of this language to be found in the
digital gallery press release. The nexus of online communication in the Art
World is e-flux, a listserv that distributes approximately three announcements
per day about art-events worldwide. In the years since its 1998 launch, the
digital archives of e-flux have accrued a corpus of texts substantial enough to
give an accurate representation of patterns of linguistic usage. All thirteen
(then) years’ worth of e-flux press announcements were entered into Sketch
Engine, a language analysis programme that allows the user to analyse language
usage in any number of ways, including discourse structure, word usage over
time, and syntactical behavioural patterns. What was spat out of Sketch Engine
at the end of this vast study is something quite extraordinary; an almost fully-formed
language, a language with its own grammatical rules, syntactic codes, and
distinctive lexicon. This language was given the title International Art
English (IAE), and it is identifiable as the Art World’s “universally foreign language”. Rule and Levine defined this
language as one that “has everything to
do with English, but (it) is emphatically not English”. IAE reclaims and
subverts existing words, in some cases cleaving them completely from their accepted
meanings. Stylistic features of IAE include elongated sentences, an odd
mishmash of past and present participles, and a liberal usage of adjectival
forms. Although no one would deny its distinctiveness, not having its own
specialist terminology means that IAE cannot be a mere technical vocabulary. IAE
is not comparable with, for example, the
specialized English of the auto-mechanic
when he talks of ‘balancers’ or ‘gauges’: While his jargon may be slightly lost
on someone who doesn’t share his understanding of the field, the semiotics of
his language are not so far dislodged as to become incomprehensible. As Rule
and Levine argue “by referring to an
obscure car part, a mechanic probably isn’t interpellating you as a member of a
common world … He isn’t identifying you as someone who does or does not get it”.
The primary function of IAE is as a way of identifying the user as a voice of
authority in the Art World, a primitive signal passed to other IAE speakers
that the user is ‘one of them’. The real question (of course, a subjective one)
is whether or not IAE actually carries any kind of intellectual seriousness, or
whether it is simply the Art World’s equivalent of management speak, needlessly
opaque blather employed to scare the little people out of the galleries. In the
interest of balanced discussion, let us draw a defence of IAE by referring to
Wittgenstein’s talking lion. If we accept that language is only rendered
intelligible by all participants in a dialogue having an understanding of the
social, political or academic backdrop against which it is employed, then it stands
to reason that active members of the Art World, those educated in the either
the practise or the theory and philosophy of art would communicate about the
subject on a different level to the casual gallery visitor, someone with
perhaps limited access to contemporary art, for reasons geographical or
otherwise. Why then is IAE defined not by its use of a specialised or technical
vocabulary, like the aforementioned mechanic, but by its tendency to use
recognizable elements of the English language in a completely unrecognizable
way? Can such an act be anything other than intentionally alienating? The
impenetrability of this particular brand of linguistic weirdness means that the
non-fluent in IAE might question their own judgement of art, believing that
they need to understand all this in order to justify their emotional or
intellectual responses to works of art.
In a welcome hymn to 21st Century inclusivity, Perry assures
his audience that they needn’t. A rather more enjoyable explanation of IAE can
be supported by Stephen Pinker’s Blank
Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2003). Pinker argues the
existence of what he coins a “baloney
generator”, essentially a face-saving device in the left hemisphere of the
brain. According to Pinker, the function of this device is to weave coherence
out of chaos, enabling us to create an ad-hoc explanation for every thought we
have, and every behaviour we exhibit; these explanations are often totally
untrue. Should we be called upon to justify ourselves to anybody, these
generators will kick in, preventing us from staying foolishly mute, even if we
have no conviction in what we are saying. While experiencing Rule and Levine’s
“metaphysical seasickness” when
reading IAE, it is easy to suppose that the entire discourse surrounding
artistic practice is little but saving face en-masse.
Since the emergence of the cluster of individuals commonly
referred to as the ‘young British artists’ (yBas) onto the British art scene in
the early to mid-1990s, exposure of contemporary art via the mass media has
increased exponentially (as an interesting aside, Perry’s Reith Lectures, the
first to ever be delivered by a fine artist, attracted the highest recorded
listening figures in the history of the flagship series). In High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young
British Art, Julian Stallabrass recognises this period as being the point
at which the traditional notion of the artist began to dissipate, and the
artist was repackaged as an “artist-personality”
- a glossier, showier, sexier reincarnation of what had been before, in which
art, image and celebrity combined. Stallabrass sites influential artist-duo
Gilbert and George, whose synchronised existences seem to be a continuous
performance art-piece, as a prime example of the artist-as-celebrity, but notes
those most famous figureheads of the yBa generation, namely Damien Hirst and Tracey
Emin, renowned for their celebrity hobnobbing in London’s Groucho Club, as
equally effective examples. Even Grayson Perry is as knowable to the public for
his transvestism, and the bawdy jollity of his public persona, as his output.
But does this re-emergence of the artist
as a public figure, whose recognisability is measurable in column inches, mean
that the pursuit of art itself is more inclusive and digestible now than it has
been previously, or that, just like the artists themselves, the elitism
surrounding the Art World has been simply reshaped somewhat. When considering
the role that this new generation has played in the opening up (or not) of the
Art World to the masses, one must consider the way that the artwork of this era
was presented to the world, and not just the artists themselves. Although it is
easy to fixate on what artefacts are
exhibited in art-spaces, it may be more conducive to discussion on the
inclusivity or exclusivity of contemporary art to also consider where and how these artefacts are displayed. If the gallery as we
traditionally recognise it – walls filled with paintings, halls filled with
sculpture - is intimidating in its cultural-historical gravitas, then one would
think that the reclamation of disused and desolate spaces by the yBas, most
famously the abandoned block in London’s Docklands that housed 1988’s Freeze, an exhibition that has since
achieved near-mythical status, were an injection of freshness into a British art
scene that was, at the time, largely stagnant. These were young artists,
turning their backs on the elitism incarnate represented by the traditional
gallery establishment, right? Wrong, argues Stallabrass, claiming that the
excitement of these shows was itself “bound up in implicit elitism”. Housing
exhibitions of work in functional, industrial spaces was less a statement about
giving art back to the communities around these emphatically not art-spaces, and more a tactical
side-stepping of the defunct apparatus represented by private galleries (that
financial recession had hit hard) and assumed philistinism of public-sector
galleries, that were not deemed ready for what these supposed radicals had to
say. Stallabrass goes on to point out that however subversive and apparently
open this approach to exhibiting art may seem, that all those involved, Hirst,
Emin et al, had been through the formal channels of art education, most coming
from the sophisticated Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, and as such were schooled
in the high theory and history of the avant-guard. These exhibitions were still
exclusive, albeit a new manifestation of exclusivity. Describing the cultural
buzz of these new exhibitions, Stallabrass notes:
While the private
views of these exhibitions were sometimes crowded, the audience was a highly
homogeneous one – an invited elite-to-be. Everyone knew everyone else, or at
least knew someone who knew everyone else. The art, the exhibitions, the social
scene that accompanied them seemed to be all of a piece, and you bought into it
entirely or not at all.
If we are to concede with Stallabrass here, we must both accept
that the step taken by the yBas away from the conventions of the British art
scene was not a serious attempt to open up an elitist institution to the more
casual observer, and nor did it claim to be. This moment in time was merely
when British art and its (now) famous faces, became commodified, and mutated in
the grip of consumer and celebrity cultures. It may have become more available and visible, through the unrelenting and deeply interconnected web of
the mass media as we now know it, but this does equate with genuine
accessibility.
Although the new faces of British art made their impressions
outside of the public-sector gallery sphere, it is still through these outlets
that most casual art-enthusiasts or occasional gallery visitors will find a
narrow entrance to the Art World. Both the National Gallery and the Tate Modern
pride themselves of being among the most visited attractions in the world. Footfall figures may help public-sector
galleries justify their funding, yet high visitor numbers are not necessarily
an accurate depiction of a public and a contemporary Art World at one with each
other. In fact, as Perry points out in ‘Democracy Has Bad Taste’, the first of his four lectures, popularity with the public
is not seen as a hallmark of quality among the art establishment. He relays a
conversation he had with a distinguished curator of one of London’s major free
galleries, a conversation in which said curator remarked that David Hockney’s
‘A Bigger Picture’ show, held at the Royal Academy in 2012, was “among the worst she’d ever seen.” ‘A
Bigger Picture’ was the most successful exhibition of the year, drawing
record-breaking crowds. Critical reception to the show was lukewarm. Here we
see a discrepancy between what art the public might respond to, and what art
the art establishment feels is good for it. The power-politics that govern the
Art World is perhaps one of the most alienating things about it. Access the
public has to art has inevitably been designed and determined for them. While
it can be argued that the public still have the critical autonomy to respond to
the art they are exposed to, they have none when it comes to what that art is. The
question of what art is displayed in galleries is not open to democratic
referendum; these are curated spaces, and every work in them, whether “object or non-object” has already been through
a series of unofficial juries at private views, auctions, and fairs. The role
of the validator is an indispensable one in the world of contemporary art,
because its values and criteria are fundamentally intangible, or metaphysical.
As such, the ability to evaluate works of art, or at least the appearance of said ability, becomes the
ability to decide what is to be considered good art. The necessity for a work
of art to undergo a process of validation before the public have access to it
brings us to an important question: who validates? The answer is an ensemble
cast of Art World characters: certain artists, certain curators, certain
critics, certain collectors. These are the people who deem whether or not a
particular artist and their oeuvre is worth our while. The public gallery may
be the closest thing to a direct channel into the Art World that the general
public has, but this is not to say that the public hold any influence over what
is offered there. In his essay Network: The Art World Described as a System,
the art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway neatly summarises the roles
available within the contemporary Art World:
The roles available
within the system, therefore do not restrict mobility; the participants can
move functionally within a cooperative system. Collectors back galleries and
influence museums by serving as trustees or by making donations; or a collector
may act as a shop window for a gallery by accepting a package collection from
one dealer or one adviser. All of us are looped together in a new and almost
unsettling connectivity.
In this model, the public represent passive recipients of
the opinions and tastes of a governing body, a body with its own hierarchy and
criteria. The Art World can operate as a closed circuit, and need not rely on
the participation of the general public to continue to do so.
The question of who decides what art is worth our seeing,
leads us to the rather trickier one of who decides what art is art at all. At
first, this may seem a redundant question, as most of us have at least some idea of what we believe to be art.
However, upon more thorough and objective consideration, many of us would
probably decide that it is very difficult to define what art is, especially contemporary art,
irrespective of our own experiences or sentimental attachments. In the second of his Reith lectures, ‘Beating
the Bounds’, Perry states that “quite
often you can’t tell if something is a work of contemporary art apart from the
fact that people are standing around it and looking at it.” In just over a
century, ‘art’ – what it is, what it means, and who makes it – has undergone a
rather considerable theoretical revision. Until the late nineteenth Century,
art was largely a quest for beauty. Art for visual pleasure could be validated
in accordance with ancient Greek philosophy and culture, which is inclined to beauty
worship. Leo Tolstoy, writing in What is
Art? (1897), perceived the genesis of aesthetics, a thread of philosophical
inquiry concerned with notions of taste and the appreciation and creation of
beauty, to be rooted in the Renaissance.
For many, the masterpieces of the Italian renaissance remain the paradigm
of artistic achievement, with almost all taking the form of one of the three
classical pillars: drawing, painting or sculpture. Tolstoy, however, goes on to
dismiss the legitimacy of ‘beauty’ as a criterion for distinguishing good art
from bad art, suggesting that is in fact the idea, thought and feeling, behind
a work of art that validates it:
According to which
the difference between good art, conveying good feelings, and bad art,
conveying wicked feelings, was totally obliterated, and one of the lowest
manifestations of art, art for mere pleasure - against which all teachers of
mankind have warned people - came to be regarded as the highest art. And art
became, not the important thing it was intended to be, but the empty amusement
of idle people
Tolstoy’s writing on the subject can now be read as an
allusion to what would happen to the concept of art in the 20th Century, how it
would become subverted and warped beyond the point of recognition. On his 1917
‘Fountain’ Marcel Duchamp, the father of modernism and conceptual art, stated
that “the danger to be avoided lies in
aesthetic delectation” (at least, according to Danto.) The ‘readymades’ of
Duchamp – including, as well as the infamous urinal, a bottle rack and a comb –
represent a new landscape in contemporary art, completely at odds with what art
had once been, and bereft of any recognizable criteria against which to measure
it. The first known definition of a ‘readymade’ appears in Paul Éluard’s and
André Breton’s Dictionnaire abrégé du
Surréalisme (1938) as follows: “An
ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of
an artist”. We now arrive at a crux in the development of contemporary art,
where it appears that all recognizable parameters surrounding the question of
what art is are blown wide open. Nearly one hundred years on, Perry would
suggest that this is when art reached its “end-state”,
the point at which anything could be art. Surely then this should be the point
at which art becomes impossible to define in terms more specific than
‘anything’; but is that really the case? Cultural radicals such as Duchamp may
have set in motion the transformative idea that anything can be art, but it is
still the old definition that exists predominantly in the minds of the masses.
To the lay-viewer, untroubled by the complexities of post-structuralist theory,
classical beauty – or, at least, a certain aesthetic agreeability - in art is
probably still a main concern, as could be something as obvious as
recognisability. Grayson Perry is an artist originally famed for his ceramic
pots, one of the most ancient and familiar of art forms, and in more recent
years for his sprawling, vividly coloured tapestries. Couple this with the fact
that Perry is self-confessedly obsessed with the middlebrow and the mundane,
the here and now of society’s behaviour, and as such a lot of his work features
signifiers we recognise and understand, such as explicitly illustrated
political hot potatoes, or Hogarth-esque parodies of consumer culture. Do we
simply like it because we can more readily understand it than a split calf in
formaldehyde, or a ceramic urinal?
In his essay ‘The Artworld’, (1964) published in The Journal
of Philosophy: Volume 61, Arthur Danto explores this issue, and ponders that most
inflammatory question of what makes art – well, art. “With this query”, writes
Danto, “we enter a domain of conceptual inquiry where even the native speakers
are poor guides: they are lost themselves”. When considering the role a figure
like Grayson Perry can play in easing a tense relationship between the general
public and the complicated hierarchy that constitutes the Art World, allow us
here to consider just what it is that renders Perry a more approachable,
acceptable face in this body. Superficially, his laurels do not separate him
from any other number of less approachable figures, such as the majority of
yBa; he is Turner Prize-winning, and also came from a specialist art-education.
He is what Danto would describe as a “native speaker”. However, unlike so many
of his contemporise, Perry extends his hand to the general public. He may not
be able to school the masses in Danto’s domain of “conceptual enquiry, nor does
he pretend to be able to, but he least invites us to be lost in this realm with
him, and to enjoy without the pressures of absolute understanding.
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