Playing to the Gallery

Starred review from March 9, 2015
Perry’s sharp wit and artistic acumen combine for a delightful tour through the issues facing contemporary art world in this series of essays. Perry, winner of the Turner Prize and known for his cross-dressing and ceramic pottery, illustrates his ideas throughout the book with good humor and grace. He displays considerable insight into the state of mainstream art, focusing on basic ideas of taste and democratic appeal. Perry’s interest is primarily in quality and taste: How do we know whether art is any good? Should popularity, sale price, or reviews determine what is truly the best work? What if it makes a political statement? Perry’s shrewd ability to simplify complex issues about contemporary art is rare and speaks to his clarity of vision as an artist and thinker. He neatly pinpoints how the fickle world of contemporary art worries too much about falling into middlebrow and he offers several of his personal “boundaries” to help readers determine whether something qualifies as art. Along the way, Perry mocks the pomposity of the highbrow, exclusive realm of galleries and museums, but he does so with the awareness that he himself has become an insider. Perry’s fun and wonderful book is a necessary addition to a world that must continue to ask difficult questions of art. 40 color illus.

Starred review from March 15, 2015

Very few books about contemporary art are laugh-out-loud funny; Perry's is. Based on his popular BBC Reith Lectures, also called Playing to the Gallery, the title's main sections correspond to the four original 2013 lectures: "Democracy Has Bad Taste," "Beating the Bounds," "Nice Rebellion, Welcome In!" and "I Found Myself in the Art World." The author's cartoonish drawings brilliantly and hilariously punctuate observations about highbrow vs. middlebrow art, commodification, gentrification, and so on. Despite the verbal and visual comedy served alongside them, the topics are ambitious: criteria used for judging and validating art's quality, the effects of popularity, determining the boundaries of what is art, the roles of shock and revolution, art as luxury good, and the author's feelings about being an artist. Perry, whose subversive ceramics won the 2003 Turner Prize, enjoys being an eccentric ambassador from within the art world, declaring that anybody can enjoy art and work toward a rewarding life in the arts--even a transvestite potter like him. VERDICT Well read but not pretentious, skeptical but not cynical, this book will have anyone interested in (or puzzled by) contemporary art laughing as they ponder major issues that define how we think about and experience art.--Lindsay King, Yale Univ. Libs, New Haven, CT

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