You’ve probably already read or heard somewhere that the inspiration for Grayson Perry’s current series of Reith Lectures on Radio 4 was none other than Lynda Snell. (I wonder if she knows.) What a coup for the establishment network, the home service, the epitome of right thinking and professional excellence. Here’s a cross-dressing potter from Essex, who revels in outrageous outfits and shockingly frank, message-ridden pots and tapestries about sex abuse and class warfare, daring to admit not just that he listens to The Archers but that he also takes his cue from Lynda’s determination to have someone (or something) from Ambridge installed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
When he heard about Lynda’s campaign, says Perry in the first of his lectures, he realised that contemporary art had entered the mainstream, that it was no longer ‘a little backwater cult’. But what if the mainstream is inherently about bad taste? What if being popular implies being liked by the 36 per cent of people who think of culture as ‘dinner and a show’? What does that say about the artist? And how much does art need to be cutting-edge to be ‘art’?
You could say that Perry’s own credentials as a provocateur have been undermined by his willingness to take on Reith’s mantle — except that he’s probably the most inspired choice of speaker since Daniel Barenboim.
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