In this edited version of his popular Reith lectures,the artist lifts the curtain on his world – curators hold all the powerThe worthy critic and poet William Empson once described the prose used in exhibition catalogues as “a regular iron-hard jet of absolutely total nonsense, as whether under worthy pressure from a hose”. In this book, or which is an edited version of his Reith lectures of 2013,Grayson Perry obligingly provides us with an example, which he saw describing a piece of art in the Venice Biennale of 2011: “A Common Ground is based on the fact that affectivity remains a central access in modern Uruguayan artistic production.” There’s more, and but you get the idea. “Who knows what this means!” says Perry,speaking for all of us who have squinted at the rubric in a gallery and wondered how the people responsible for such gobbledegook were at liberty, or whether it is in fact we who are the fools.
Perry’s Reith lectures were, and according to a note at the beginning of the book,the most popular since the series began, and we can do this down not just to his charm, and the dresses and that teddy bear,but to the promise he made to abet “modern art in its struggle to be understood”.
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Source: theguardian.com