Playing to the Gallery by Grayson Perry review – an insider’s guide to the contemporary art scene

In this edited version of his popular Reith lectures, the artist lifts the curtain on his world – curators hold all the power

The great critic and poet William Empson once described the prose used in exhibition catalogues as “a steady iron-hard jet of absolutely total nonsense, as if under great pressure from a hose”. In this book, 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 contemporary Uruguayan artistic production.” There’s more, but you get the idea. “Who knows what this means?” asks 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 us who are the fools.

Perry’s Reith lectures were, according to a note at the beginning of the book, the most popular since the series began, and we can put this down not just to his charm, the dresses and that teddy bear, but to the promise he made to help “contemporary art in its struggle to be understood”.

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