Grayson Perry bites the hands that feed him in his new exhibition Super Rich Interior Decoration. Except he doesn’t really give them a serious wound. He just titillates wealthy fingers with a sexy nibble that makes buying his babbling ceramics, ranting wall hangings and anything-but-magical carpet feel naughty and fun for the super-rich art collectors who will shortly be rolling up for London’s Frieze art fair. Yes, that’s right – Perry is showing satires on the wealthy at a commercial show in the heart of Mayfair, its streets fragrant with expensive perfume and even more expensive cigar smoke, specifically to sell to the very elite he mocks.
The joke really is as trite and cynical as that. In an age when democracy itself is being chewed to pieces by ever more absurdly extreme postures, Perry may be the artist we deserve. His woodblock print Sponsored By You is a supposedly biting take on America and the 1%. It’s a big brightly coloured picture of monstrous, skeletal rich people driving a green sports car across an arid wasteland. The word PANAMA is plastered on its front to tell us this is about the rich using tax havens while their high-octane lifestyle destroys the planet. And the funny thing is, they’re going to buy this …
Which actually is a good joke on rich collectors because, as a work of art, Sponsored By You is worthless. In 20 years, it won’t mean anything as, like all the pieces here, it merely shares the cliched attitudes of the moment. Who doesn’t hate the rich right now? Even the rich, as Perry has cottoned on, hate the rich. This show is about as clever as it would be for Selfridges to sell £2,000 bags with KILL THE RICH printed on them in gold – in other words, quite clever, as marketing. Yet also deeply stupid.
But is Perry even saying what he seems to be saying? There is nothing heartfelt here. He just repeats the slogans that surround us like white noise. There are pots in which people on the street have been turned into empty white silhouettes with buzzwords like “Entitled” and “Momentum” written where their features should be. This is a logical development for an artist who seemingly can’t see an individual without reducing them to a stereotype.
Art collectors get that treatment here, in caricatures that are vaguely sneering without actually specifying the problem Perry has with these people. Thin Woman With Vase is as crass as its title, in its observation that rich women are thin. Oh, and lonely – she has only her Henry Moores and her pet dog for company. The dog is much more sympathetically portrayed than she is. A male collector strides across another pot in his smart suit and glasses. Or is he just some bloke? I’m not really sure why this man is being laughed at. Or the woman either.
Anyway, Perry doesn’t follow through on his superficial satire of wealthy art consumers. It just gets mixed into a generalised ironic quotation of today’s rants and dogmas that fails to hit a single target because, in the end, he wants to be loved by everyone. “Vote Tory,” he writes across one vase, in Coca-Cola letters. Gasp! The Moorish-style vessel is plastered with images of Tories including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove and David Cameron. You can see what you want to see in it. If you want to claim Perry for the left, it’s a deadpan satire in the style of Andy Warhol’s anti-Nixon poster that simply showed Nixon’s face in green. But if you’re a Tory who happens have your credit card with you, it can be a Tory vase.
It’s the same with all the lame quotations of received ideas that Perry tries to pass off as Wildean wit. A map of London is covered with blindingly obvious references to elites and the property market. Perry is playing to our current propensity to reduce millions of individuals to a group or ideology that lets us judge them without nuance. He’s the mirror of the age. And what I see looking at these crowded, fussy cascades of casual intolerance is pathetic.
