Alastair Smart

If you hate art-world show-offs, Grayson Perry, what’s with the frocks?

A review of ‘Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art in its Struggle to be Understood’, by Grayson Perry. Perry’s Reith Lectures asked pertinent questions but didn’t bother with serious answers

‘Me as Dorothy’ by Grayson Perry —but what’s with the frocks? 
issue 20 September 2014

At the time it was all too easy to get sucked in by the hype. In 2013, Grayson Perry was the first visual artist ever to give the Reith Lectures and — unlike so many of his dry, earnest predecessors — here was a speaker ready to fulfil all three Reithian aims: to inform, educate and entertain. (‘I still find commercial art galleries intimidating,’ he observed in the first lecture. ‘From the frighteningly chic gallery girls on the front desk to the reverential hush around arcane lumps of stuff inside.’)

Here also was a transvestite potter from Essex being welcomed to the heart of the British cultural establishment, a one-time outsider who’d made his name with pots depicting fetishism and bondage.

Greeted by critical acclaim, audience laughter throughout and feet-stamping appreciation at the end, the lectures were a four-part quest to explain the strange workings of the contemporary art world.

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