Latest news with #GraysonPerry
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘World champion of appropriation' Grayson Perry says he isn't bothered by AI using his work
Grayson Perry has said he doesn't 'really mind' if his work is used to train AI models, adding that throughout his entire career he had been 'ripping off' others. Speaking at the Charleston literature festival, held on the grounds of Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's former home, the artist jokingly referred to himself as 'the world champion of cultural appropriation'. 'I've never worried about if anyone wants to use my work in a lecture or whatever they want to do with it,' he said. Nor does he expect any money from those uses – partly because much of his work's value comes from it being 'physical' and 'often unique'. However, the Turner prize-winning artist added he is in 'a luxurious position, being well-known'. He said he's never tried asking AI to make an image in the style of Grayson Perry. 'Maybe I should ask that, that would be interesting,' he said. 'Maybe I'll get cross then, maybe I'll be immediately signing a letter.' The 65-year-old said he has been 'tinkering' with AI and his latest exhibition, Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection, includes AI-generated self-portraits. 'My experience of AI is that it's not that good yet, so don't worry,' he said, adding that he's 'not sure' if the models will ever become 'amazingly creative'. But he does think AI is 'going to do all the mediocre stuff' in the future. 'If you're a birthday card designer, you're fucked.' Perry said he had recently used an AI tool and prompted it to create simply 'an artwork'. The result showed a canvas that 'looked like someone had just put all the colours on there', he said. 'I thought it was the perfect metaphor for what the internet does. It smooshes everything together into a bland paste. It does that with all culture.' He said AI art 'went through this brilliant phase' when it tended to have a hallucinatory, 'surreal, nice, interesting' quality to it. Now, though, AI has become 'almost too good', the artist said, describing it as being like 'a very, very pedantic 14-year-old' that says: 'Look at me, I can do a very realistic drawing'! Perry also said he thinks 'narrative is the most potent form of human art' – which is why he creates characters for himself – Claire, Alan Measles and most recently his alter ego 'Shirley Smith', who features as the 'artist' behind his Wallace Collection works. He said he is 'a bit envious' of artists of the past who 'had religion' linked to 'stories that everybody understood', which they could reference in their work. Though he's 'not spiritual' he said he loves the idea of religion. 'Spirituality has a relationship to religion like creativity has a relationship to art,' he said, adding that in both cases he's more interested in something definite than 'vague thoughts' or 'fuzzy woo woo'.
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Frieze New York Is Smaller but Still Packs a Global Punch
Visiting Frieze New York used to include a frisson of danger amid acres of great art. Held in a quarter-mile-long tent on Randall's Island, the New York edition of the art fair that appears on three continents offered world-class vistas of Manhattan as well as the threat of squalls that could flood the exhibits or fears that the big tent might take off like a kite in high winds. Not anymore. For the fifth year, Frieze New York, which runs through Sunday, is anchored firmly in the Shed, the bunkerlike building in Hudson Yards. There's less art here than in the old days — 67 galleries, compared with nearly 200 booths in 2019 — but also less distraction. As art fairs have proliferated, it's refreshing to find Frieze New York still presenting work that is brash or downright risky, along with elements of the resolutely blue-chip TEFAF on Park Avenue and the cool midlevel Independent in TriBeCa. While art tourists can always gorge locally on art — for example, TriBeCa Gallery Night on Friday offers more than 70 participating galleries and art spaces — Frieze is a chance to travel through the global art world without leaving Manhattan. Here are a handful of booths that show you what art still has the capacity to do. The London gallerist Victoria Miro is showing a handful of in-your-face artists who are not (or were not) afraid to speak their minds. Chief among them is the glorious Grayson Perry, a Turner Prize winner and cross-dressing potter who also wrote an iconoclastic autobiography titled 'Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl' (2007). On display here is a tapestry, 'Fascist Swing' (2021), which remakes Fragonard's randy Rococo painting of cavorting lovers, and hulking ceramic vessels with provocative slogans like 'Free Speech is Hate Speech' inscribed in them. Along with Perry's works are figurative paintings by formidable female painters like Alice Neel and Paula Rego. On the same floor, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, which has outposts in Brooklyn and San Francisco, has an exhilarating display of paintings by Esther Mahlangu, a member of the Ndebele people of South Africa. Mahlangu's abstract geometric canvases were made with a chicken-feather brush. Although they look much like paintings by European modernists and have been showcased in big exhibitions at the Pompidou in Paris and Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany, in 1992, the paintings draw on community values and even prayers. The Brazilian gallery A Gentil Carioca is showing three artists whose work highlights the earth — but through the filter of political, social and environmental concerns. Denilson Baniwa's watercolor and graphite on tururi (a natural vegetable fiber) celebrates Indigenous cosmologies, while Maria Nepomuceno makes sculptures with straw, beads, wood and ceramics drawn from Indigenous artisanal traditions. Kelton Campos Fausto paints with natural pigments on linen, showcasing Yoruba spiritual guides and clay vessels. In the Focus section of the fair, which features emerging and younger galleries, South Korea's G Gallery is a standout with its presentation of the Korean-born, New York-based artist Yehwan Song. For her installation, Song created a faceted cardboard armature and projected video onto it. Titled 'Internet Barnacles' (2025), the booth-size work points to how water serves as a constant metaphor for digital activities ('surfing' the internet; 'streaming,' 'cloud'). If water seems anathema to digital processing, the use of cardboard serves as an antidote to the hard plastic, metal and minerals required to make the digital realm flow. Painting is the fuel that generally runs art fairs, and Frieze is filled with plenty of it. The Chicago gallery Gray, which has an impressive display, is hosting two painters: the Michigan-based Judy Ledgerwood and the Oklahoma-born Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996). Smith was inspired by the primary colors of Mondrian and the curvaceous geometries of Brancusi and Jean Arp. His hard-edge abstractions are complemented here by Ledgerwood's playful compositions that draw from folk art — perhaps even wallpaper or fabric designs — as well as the lineage of modern abstraction. From Los Angeles, Night Gallery is showing the Canadian artist Wanda Koop's 'Plywood Paintings' from 1981 to 1990. (In addition to her work as an artist, Koop also founded Art City, a free community art center in Winnipeg.) A couple of her large grayscale paintings, which look almost abstract, actually depict satellite dishes on buildings. Other paintings feature stark landscapes or a swan stranded in a pink ground. There is a spareness to Koop's paintings, but also a strong material presence, with buildings and trees carved out of chunky brushstrokes applied to heavy wooden panels. I saw Malo Chapuy's paintings earlier this year in Mor Charpentier's Paris gallery, and they were an excellent complement to an extraordinary historical exhibition: 'Figures of the Fool: From the Middle Ages to the Romantics' at the Louvre, which explored how this tragicomic character prefigured modern humans and their existential condition. Chapuy recreates religious compositions from the Middle Ages and borrows old techniques, as well, including wooden panels and gold leaf and hand-carved frames — and then inserts modern-day objects into the mix. Gas masks and wind farms appear among the donors, saints and fools. What might read as a gimmick gains gravity when you ponder the connections between past and present politics, religions, wars, superstitions and so on. Fairs are very much for-profit ventures (sadly, what isn't these days in the art world), but two nonprofit initiatives at Frieze deserve mention. The Artist Plate Project, founded to benefit the Coalition for the Homeless, features editions of dinner plates with images by famous artists, living and dead, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Sanford Biggers, Cindy Sherman and Jackson Pollock. For $250, you can help homeless people — and it's probably the most affordable way of being a shopper rather than a browser at Frieze. The other initiative, 'Incomplete* Listing,' compiled by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School includes a detailed list and map of 84 freely accessible reading spaces in New York. Some, like the Brooklyn Public Library, are more obvious. Others are lesser known, like the Library of the Printed Web at MoMA, the Morbid Anatomy Library & Giftshop or Wendy's Subway, a reading room, writing space and independent publisher in Bushwick. But they might be good places to commune with art-and-idea-minded people when the rush of Frieze week subsides.
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Telegraph
What I learnt on a grand tour of the least loved cities in the British Isles
'From a young age I've always done two things – barked up the wrong tree and backed the underdog.' That's the first line of a new book that attempts to heap praise on 12 of the least popular cities in the UK and Ireland, and argue that anywhere – like anyone – can be interesting and enjoyable if given half the chance. (Even Reading.) The book is a love letter to the wrong direction, a half-baked investigation into what we value and why, and a small and imperfect answer to over-tourism. It won't win any beauty prizes, but its heart is in the right place, and the destinations it features are indisputably deserving of the readers' attention. The book is called Shitty Breaks: A Celebration of Unsung Cities, and I wrote it. When I resolved to set off in search of overlooked metrópoles, I didn't just follow a hunch. Instead, I contacted tourist boards and got hold of a league table that showed me where people were willingly going for a weekend away. When I saw Edinburgh near the summit, Leeds in mid-table and Coventry flirting with danger just above the drop zone, I flipped the thing upside down and went from there. Each of the cities I visited proved nourishing and diverting and full of surprises. Grayson Perry popped up in Chelmsford. The Venerable Bede made a cameo in Sunderland. David Hockney was everywhere in Bradford. Epic history reared its head in Preston (in the form of two almighty battles), while Limerick delivered Georgian streets, the best Guinness in Ireland, and a volume of 'craic' that I'm still coming to terms with. The spirit of the book is akin to the spirit of an article I wrote for this newspaper two years ago, for which I visited some of England's least popular tourist attractions, including a camel farm, an old doss-house, and a folly in Somerset. I enjoyed every one of those unlikely outings, and the experience was a useful reminder that deviating from the hotspots can be a variously fruitful endeavour. One of the biggest fruits issued by my city-break odyssey was the history I encountered. In Preston it was an activist called Edith who burnt down the cottage of a soap magnate from Bolton. In Chelmsford it was the impact of an Italian immigrant called Guglielmo Marconi who gave the world radio when he opened the world's first wireless factory at Chelmsford. While in Dunfermline it was the story of Andrew Carnegie, who became the richest man in the world before spending his final years trying to give away every penny he had, a course of behaviour that still gives his descendants nightmares. Another dividend issued by my travels came in the form of constructions. The bus station in Preston is unthinkably large and gives every impression that it's about to take off (which I suppose is appropriate for a transport hub). The old Express & Star building in Wolverhampton – where Boris Johnson did work experience as a precocious seven-year-old – is an Art Deco whopper straight out of Chicago. And the Transporter Bridge in Newport is about as delightful as an eyesore can be. My jaunts in the wrong direction also provided plenty of atypical foodstuffs. It was orange chips in Wolves, butter pie in Preston, and jellied eels in Chelmsford. It was the pink slice in Sunderland, and also a questionable substance by the name of pease pudding (which I can't in good faith recommend). Finally, in Dunfermline, it was a pie filled with haggis, black pudding and square sausage rondels that wouldn't look out of place in an episode of Grand Designs. Another thing my unlikely getaways offered in abundance was straight-up diversion. In Chelmsford it was an innings of cricket and a trip to a vineyard. In Newport it was track-cycling and all the Roman remains. In Milton Keynes it was indoor skydiving and a tour of Bletchley Park. And in Wolves it was the Pop Art at its gallery, the panto at The Grand, and a session at the racecourse, where I bet on a horse called Probable that duly came last. For me, it's people that make a place tick. I'm not talking about the likes of JB Priestley and the Venerable Bede, or Ryan Reynolds and the witchfinder general, but rather the everyday characters who add so much to any adventure. Like the girl in Wrexham who grabbed me by the scruff of the boxers during a session of karaoke and made me do a duet with her cousin. Or the guy in Newry who caught me photographing his cottage and instead of telling me off invited me in to watch the tennis and talk about love. Or the paramedic in Wolves who I overheard complaining that he only got tipped a tenner for providing life-saving CPR. Separately, such brief encounters can seem of piddling significance, but taken together they constitute a reason to roam. We live in an overly signposted and algorithmic world, wherein a handful of destinations are getting the lion's share of visitors. From what I can tell, those destinations are starting to creak and complain under the weight of their renown (the worst pizza I've ever had was in Venice, for example), meaning there's perhaps been no better time to save yourself a fortune, dodge the madding crowd, give Lisbon the cold shoulder, and go on a flipping s----- break. My three favourite s----- cities in the British Isles Limerick The former Viking stronghold is like a mini-Dublin, only with better Guinness and a bigger castle. Local legends include Terry Wogan, a lady called Eleanor who runs a tea emporium called Cahill's, and the enigmatic polymath called Blindboy who operates with a plastic bag on his head and is Ireland's answer to Stephen Fry (sort of). The pub is a way of life in Limerick, and I enjoyed that way of life at Dolan's to begin with and then afterwards at The Locke, each of the pair adding far too much grist to my mill. There's Canteen for small plates and Rift for your coffee, and I stayed at No.1 Pery Square, which is an elegant setup in the Georgian part of town. Sunderland Sunderland is a former shipbuilding heavyweight and the best city in the North East. As well as its long, sandy beach, there's The Empire for shows, The Fire Station for gigs, Pop Recs for poetry and stand-up and unbelievable focaccia, and Silksworth for skiing (yep, skiing). Consider North and Mexico 70 for top-notch tucker, the Penshaw Monument for a gorgeous folly on a hill, and I'm told that Hairy Biker Si King's new joint Propa does a very good pie. Make no mistake, Sunderland is going places. Dunfermline By my reckoning, Dunfermline has more history per square metre than Edinburgh. Robert the Bruce, Andrew Carnegie, Saint Margaret – the city is veritably teeming with heritage. I went water-skiing, hover-crafting, and saw The Pars come from behind to beat mighty Inverness. I caught a gig at The Monarch, ate handsomely at Jack 'O' Bryans, discovered the work of Sandy Moffat at Fire Station Creative, and fell for a café called Wynd. I loved the peacocks that bowl around town, strutting between buildings hewn from a handsome grey sandstone. For accommodation, Garvock House Hotel is a decent indie option.
Jordan Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Jordan Times
UK artist Grayson Perry indulges playful side in new show
Grayson Perry poses for a photograph beside 'The Great Beauty', a piece made from oak, brass and ceramics, during a photocall for 'Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur' at The Wallace Collection in London (AFP photo) LONDON — It was a radical idea: give UK artist Grayson Perry, known for his cross-dressing and flamboyant, colourful art, carte blanche to create new works inspired by one of the world's finest collections of decorative arts. The result, which is going on show at London's Wallace Collection museum, is surprising, as well as full of mischief and fun. "I gave me permission to sort of play," the eccentric artist told reporters on Tuesday. "I think that... as an artist, especially as you get older, you've got to give yourself permission to play, mess around, have fun, enjoy making things." Some 40 totally new works by the artist will be on show from March 28 in the exhibition "Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur" at the Wallace. The collection normally houses paintings from the 14th to the 19th centuries by artists such as Titian, Velazquez, Rubens and Van Dyck alongside arms and armour, and enamel, glass and bronze artworks. "I was walking around the museum, and I realised that there was a lot of the work that I liked, but I didn't love," Perry said, with a pink bell-shaped hat clamped on his blond hair, and wearing a patterned pink, red and orange burlesque ensemble. "I came up with this idea that I needed to invent an artist who loved the Wallace collection beyond measure." To help him, Perry invented an alter ego: the unknown and fragile artist Shirley Smith, who thinks she is Millicent Wallace, heiress to the collection. "And so this is a sort of collaboration between me, her and the Wallace collection," added Perry, who was knighted in 2023 for his contribution to the arts. Perry, 65, a winner of the prestigious Turner Prize, has become a household name thanks to numerous appearances on television including this year's celebrity singing competition "The Masked Singer", in which he was disguised as a kingfisher. His 40 new creations include sculptures, tapestries, drawings and ceramics inspired by the works in the Wallace -- in the museum's largest ever contemporary exhibition. 'Having fun' One new work is based on an 18th-century bronze of a musician, but coloured pearls have been replaced by bits of shells and stones, in a Rococo style. And since politics is never far from Perry's works, the musician sports a cape adorned with protest badges denouncing austerity policies or supporting various charities. Less directly provocative than other Perry collections, these new creations still recall the contemporary issues and familiar themes which thread through his works. In one work, "Fascist Swing", Perry thumbs his nose at artists who claim to be activists and for whom the word "fascist is an easy insult". "He's having fun creating things. He's... playing with badges and shells and making the pots and making things out of clay," Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection, told AFP. "At the same time, he's also aware that there are modern techniques such as artificial intelligence, which he uses for his self-portraits. "And then with that, he starts layering it with meaning, with symbols, with words, with signs, to... bring out the sort of social context."
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur: An awkward, snarky venture devoid of class and wit
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.
