Grayson Perry thinks democracy has bad taste. Is that why he sells luxury goods to the rich? 

‘Democracy has bad taste’, declared potter Grayson Perry in his Reith Lectures on the BBC about art. Tell that to the inventors of democracy.

Ancient Greeks would have been appalled at the reverence accorded the views of potters, artists, chefs and other riff-raff about their work, let alone anything else. The satirist Lucian says of the would-be sculptor: ‘You will be nothing but a workman, doing hard physical labour and investing the entire hope of your livelihood in it. You will be obscure, earning a meagre and ignoble wage, a man of low esteem… a workman and one of the common mob… Even if you should emerge a Pheidias or a Polykleitos and produce numerous marvellous works, so that all praise your art, there is nobody who, if he had any sense, would pray to be like you.’

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Artists, then, were simply technicians, like bricklayers or cobblers.