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The savvy Mr Perry

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

Unpopular Culture
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea

There is much to applaud and agree with here, but in the days of yore which Mr Perry celebrates there were far fewer art galleries to mount exhibitions, and those that did take place were invariably reviewed in the daily press. There may not have been less appetite for salacious gossip, but there was far less of it printed in serious newspapers, and arts editors saw it as their duty to an intelligent readership to inform them of what was going on in the art world. Culture was not unpopular. Today, critics are constrained by myopic editors into reviewing only the same big museum shows as all the other papers, with an unseemly and childish race to be first into print, as if reviews were news rather than comment; or they are encouraged to chronicle the latest guff from the currently fashionable.

The coverage that this magazine, a weekly, gives to the arts is far wider than many daily newspapers. I wish more arts editors would take the initiative to cover a greater range of exhibition than just the obvious. What has happened to subtlety? Has it been so marginalised that it’s now unrecognisable? Not on the showing of Mr Perry’s selection, which, because of Mr Perry, has (thankfully) attracted rather more attention than it would otherwise have done. I trust his interest in the artists he’s selected is sincere. He has remarked that ‘in an art world inured to shock one of the last sins available to the artist is to be slightly conservative’. I hope this doesn’t mean that his selection was actuated solely by the desire to shock, though shock can be salutary. However, if this show does manage to inform a new audience that there was worthwhile and enjoyable painting and sculpture being made in England before art was so utterly dominated by the fashionable, then it will have performed a considerable cultural service.

There are many pleasures: Paul Nash, Lowry and William Roberts offering different takes on seaside excursions. Excellent documentary photographs by the likes of Bert Hardy and Tony Ray-Jones record what Grayson Perry calls ‘a lost world of close-knit communities’. I particularly look forward to seeing the Burras and Paolozzis, the very different versions of Hammersmith by Victor Pasmore and Ruskin Spear, Alan Reynolds’s oil, ‘The Village — Winter’ (1952) and Leonard Rosoman’s ‘Gardens on Different Levels’ (1955).