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Sunday 7 September 2008

The savvy Mr Perry

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

This is not a review, for I haven’t yet seen the exhibition under discussion, it’s an expression of mixed incredulity and interest. The exhibition is called Unpopular Culture, and is an artist’s selection from the Arts Council Collection. On the press release is a photo of its selector, the potter and personality Grayson Perry, dressed familiarly in women’s clothing. The show of some 70 paintings, sculptures and photos, is apparently by unfashionable 20th-century British artists. The available press photos are by the lesser-known exhibitors — David Hepher, Meg Rutherford and Jack Smith — but the selection also includes such well-known and well-loved names as Henry Moore, Edward Burra, John Piper, L.S. Lowry and Paul Nash. Unpopular culture? Who says so?

A friend of mine went to the launch of the exhibition which took place at that Modernist architectural masterpiece, the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. (The building was designed in 1935 by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff, refurbished and reopened in 2005, and sits on the Marina among the ranks of the well-retired like an abandoned liner.) My friend is an admirer of Grayson Perry and was impressed by the selection of works, but even he was incensed that so many great British artists were designated ‘unpopular’. He thought it might be a publicity stunt of some sort by the savvy Mr Perry, who is after all a media celebrity, and has his finger on the pulse of the nation’s press and would never knowingly underestimate its ignorance. To hard-pressed journalists, the combined might of 20th-century British art would be a mere nothing compared to Mr Perry batting his eyelashes and showing his legs to the cameras. And judging by the column inches generated by the event, the show has already been a success.

I make it a policy to avoid reading the crasser art journalists in the broadsheets (it’s not good for the blood pressure), but a colleague rather gleefully drew my attention to one Sunday review of Unpopular Culture. This particular critic seemed positively to exult in his ignorance of many of the artists in the show, lamenting the dreary loser nature of the black-and-white past as against the colourful success story of today. I wish it were so: poor deluded scribbler. A society gets the art it deserves and our quick-fix depraved sensationalism is spot on. As Philip Larkin wrote in ‘Going, Going’, his magnificent lament for vanishing England: ‘greeds / And garbage are too thick-strewn / To be swept up now, or invent / Excuses that make them all needs.’

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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