Grayson Perry shows us how the art world works – as a formidable cartel

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/20/grayson-perry-how-art-world-works

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Is Grayson Perry the first transvestite to deliver a BBC Reith lecture? Only as far as we know, as the artist noted when he delivered his first talk in a series of four, at London's Tate Modern this week. Far more significantly, Perry is the first visual artist ever to have done the gig, even though the Reith lectures have been running since 1948.

Perry's series is called Playing to the Gallery, which is pretty cute. In all other walks of life, "playing to the gallery" means aiming to please the general public. But in the art world, the gallery is the place where an object – any object, Duchamp's urinal having been mentioned, inevitably, during the lecture – is defined as possessing a unique, special, hard-to-define and priceless quality.

The other gallery, the general public, are only allowed to enter that sort of gallery after elite value judgments have already been made for them. In fact, the title of this particular lecture, Democracy Has Bad Taste, is a teasing reference to the fact that the views of the general public are the very last criteria art tastemakers would ever pay any attention to.

Perry's stated aim, in delivering his lectures, is to offer tools to people who are not confident about judging art. He wants them to feel free to view exhibitions without feeling that their opinion is somehow invalid (even though, in a real sense, it is).

Perry's contention is that it helps to have some insight into the process that confers the status of "art". To that end, he described the taste-making process vividly, humorously, warts and all. He mentioned ignorant oligarchs buying pieces of substandard art as luxury goods; the astonishing influence private collector Charles Saatchi achieved in the 1980s and 90s; the ridiculously inflated prices that substandard works, even of highly regarded artists, can fetch, and the pretensions of the deliberately opaque language used to describe art.

Yet Perry nevertheless spoke approvingly of "the chorus of validation", who define what art is. At the top of the tree are the public collectors, the curators of national or municipal collections. This job is taken very seriously. A curator is forbidden from privately collecting any work connected to their professional specialism, because the imprimatur bestowed by inclusion in a public collection raises the value of the artist's work.

An agent-gallerist, however, is under no such honourable restriction. If they have a private gallery that attracts interest and sales, then the work they sell and often collect increases in value. Private collectors are under no such restriction either, of course. If they mount a show by an artist they collect, or one is mounted by someone else, such as the artist's agent or a curator, and it's a hit … then they're in the money. Artists themselves, Perry claims, value most of all the approbation of other artists.

It's important to stress that as far as can be told at present, the chorus of validation has sung in perfect harmony for Perry, give or take a critic or two. (Though Perry was overly dismissive of the role of media hype in the art world.) The weight of consensus suggests that he's the real deal, an artist working within a venerable historic tradition that he comprehends fully and richly, and is gifted enough to have joined himself.

He's the first to admit that only history can fully validate that judgment. Perry says that at any given time, this time included, the majority of the art being produced isn't really worthwhile. The expert at Sotheby's, he argues, gets to see all of the rubbish pieces of impressionist art. We, the general public, tend only to see the masterpieces.

But the problem is that the chorus of validation doesn't always sing in harmony, by any means. The perceived status of an artist is often controversial, even within the art world. I don't know if it's intellectual generosity that has impelled Perry to set out so vividly a process so open to manipulation, leaving his audience to join the dots, or if he's genuinely too close to his subject to be impartial. But I do know that the excitement of Perry's lecture was that it raised as many questions as it answered.

At one point, the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, spoke from the audience, saying that contrary to popular legend, the Tate has not tried to buy Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for £2m. (It sold for much more.) But Hirst had, Serota said, generously donated another important work, A Thousand Years, to the Tate's collection.

Generously? Tricky. Sure, Hirst enriched the Tate's national collection at no cost to the taxpayer, and sacrificed the money he'd have earned by selling it. Yet, Perry had already explained how the imprimatur of the curators of national collections was of crucial importance in establishing an artist's place in the canon, and also the cash value of his work. Surely, when curators are grateful when an artist comes to them, especially so early in their careers, then the tail is wagging the dog? Does this matter, anyway? After all, Hirst's contemporary significance as a cultural figure is unquestionable.

Does it matter, more generally, if artists become fabulously rich in their own lifetimes by extracting money from people with more of it than sense? Does it matter that public money is being invested in art that no one may want to see in 20 years, if it's pulling in crowds now, attracting interest, debate and economic activity, providing jobs for artists in a world that seemed destined to be fully taken over by mass production? On balance, probably not, unless you cling to the childish notion that life is fair.

But one thing rankles: democracy has bad taste. That's an assertion that the art world has to continue promulgating in order to justify its own taste-making role. In truth, the art world's great and audacious achievement has been in so successfully resisting democratisation. Sure, there's public art all over the place, going to shows has never been more popular, artists are media personalities and the establishment of a public gallery is now seen as an excellent way of reinvigorating entire communities.

Yet in the private spaces of our homes, the only art people can afford is reproduced in a book, or on a postcard or a poster from a gallery, all of it by kind permission of the owner. If you're a bit better off, you might buy a limited edition print or object. Yet these things are expensive mainly because the number of their reproductions is kept deliberately small, so that they remain special, different and exclusive.

Buying a good piece of art on an average income is hard, however good your taste, unless you can invest plenty of time in research, and catch artists before they make it big. And, as they say, time is money. It's impossible to know whether democracy has good taste in art or not, because the art world works as a formidable cartel. As Perry explained in such detail, there is a network of gatekeepers, and one way or another, cash always plays its part in opening the gate.

That might sound awful, even corrupt. But, its real significance lies elsewhere. The art market is a gargantuan practical refutation of the idea that only free markets create economic growth and wealth. The dynamic interplay between public and private is essential to the art world's ability to "add value"; to create not just private wealth but public service jobs.

This radical message is not directly vocalised by Perry. But it's delivered all the same. This is just the first of four lectures, and already he has contributed massively to the public discourse – which suggests that the time for a visual artist to ascend the Reith podium was very long overdue.

<em>Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures</em><em> will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, beginning on 15 October at 9am.</em>

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