Sketchbooks by Grayson Perry review – ‘daft notions that later became art’

Part diary, part pornography, part graphic novel – this beautiful book gives a feeling of an artist exploring things on paper

^‘For quite a while I was “an artist’s artist”, ie poor’, said Grayson Perry in Playing to the Gallery, the book of his wonderfully entertaining 2013 Reith Lectures. Both in his art and his writing, Perry has long been critical of the extent to which contemporary art is driven by money and celebrity. Pottery is his medium of choice, he has said, because of its lack of pretensions. His 2011 exhibition at the British Museum – The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman – championed the work of the nameless potters and metalworkers who made so many of the museum’s treasures. Perry compares such thoughtful craft with the craziness of a world in which Cézanne’s Card Players is deemed to be “worth” up to $300m (£211m) largely based on brand recognition.

Perry himself is now neither poor nor obscure. He still casts himself as an outsider: “an Essex transvestite potter” who has somehow been let in by the “artworld mafia”. But he knows better than anyone that ever since he won the Turner prize in 2003 for his subversive ceramics, he has been part of the British art establishment, too. Much as he seems to relish turning up at events dressed as “Claire”, in outlandish babydoll frocks and smocks and a Louise Brooks bob, his fame has inevitably changed the atmosphere in which he works, as he explains in Sketchbooks:

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