Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur: An awkward, snarky venture devoid of class and wit

Telegraph

26-03-2025

What an awkward, snarky venture Grayson Perry 's new exhibition proves to be. The root cause of the problem? His disdain for the Wallace Collection to which he was invited to respond.
Bagging a show by Perry – who has worked successfully with other museums in the past – must have seemed like a coup. Surely, his indestructible popularity would attract new audiences to this national museum just north of London's Oxford Street, which deserves improved footfall? Recently, Perry, a brilliant media personality, popped up dressed as a kingfisher on The Masked Singer on ITV.
Yet, when he engaged with, as he puts it, 'all the gold and sprawling nudes, the curlicues, cartouches and cherubs' at Hertford House, he was left cold. ('I found it cloying,' he says.) So, he came up with a character who, he explains, could 'love' the Wallace 'for me': working-class Shirley Smith, a self-taught artist from Barking, who believed herself to be the 'rightful heir' of its founder, Sir Richard Wallace.
Drawings supposedly by Smith appear in Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur, along with black-and-white photographs of Perry, in drag, pretending to be her within the museum's interiors. It's all very arch and over-elaborate, and fails to mask the fact that working on this show seemingly never got Perry's creative juices flowing.
At points, his irritation with the project is palpable. In a label, he describes Vase, Eighteenth Century, French, one of several new pots he's produced for the exhibition (alongside tapestries and works on paper), as 'a grumpy outburst in pottery form', a self-consciously 'chunky, crude and earthy' rebuke to 'hyper-refined and crafted 18th-century Sèvres porcelain', which, he continues, 'I have come to loathe'. Okay, so he hates French Rococo style – but, given that this is a speciality of the Wallace Collection, why take this exhibition on?
Uninspired, he resorts to addressing themes concerning class, money, and taste that he's tackled umpteen times before, while mimicking, even ripping off, what used to be called 'outsider art', such as Russian 'lubok' prints or the drawings of Madge Gill. It's annoying: Perry's magpie-like, imitative art is so much cleaner and more marketable than its sources. Why is this rich insider (who was knighted a couple of years ago) still masquerading as an outsider when it comes to the visual conventions he adopts?
In another label, he confesses, randomly, to a 'persistent prejudice' regarding 'West London': whenever he passes Oxford Circus, he writes, 'I imagine I can smell a great sense of entitlement emanating from people who live in a cossetted bubble of beige international wealth.' While the (centrally located) Wallace Collection may be a sort of palace of historical privilege, it is anything but 'beige'. Perry likes to tease and provoke, but, here, while thumbing his nose, he just comes across as sullen. Where's his famous wit?
It's possible, I suppose, he's articulating what some people may feel: that the Wallace Collection is a bastion of elitism, and a turn-off for ordinary gallery-goers. Even if this were true (and I'm unconvinced), I fail to see how the Wallace Collection is served by such a stroppy show.