Latest news with #WallaceCollection
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'.
NDTV
29-04-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Maharashtra Acquires Raghuji Bhonsle's Sword For Rs 47 Lakh At London Auction
Mumbai: The Maharashtra Government has acquired the famous "Raghuji Sword" of the 18th century Maratha general Raghuji Bhonsle for Rs 47.15 lakh at an auction in London, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on Tuesday. Raje Raghuji Bhonsle, founder of the Bhonsle dynasty of Nagpur, had in 1745 led the battle against the Nawab of Bengal, D Fadnavis said on X. नागपूरच्या भोसले घराण्याचे संस्थापक राजे रघुजी भोसले यांची लंडनमध्ये लिलावात निघालेली ऐतिहासिक तलवार ही राज्य सरकारने खरेदी केली आहे, हे सांगताना मला आनंद होतो. त्यामुळे आपल्या मराठा साम्राज्यातील एक मौलिक आणि ऐतिहासिक ठेव आता महाराष्ट्रात येणार आहे. रघुजी भोसले हे छत्रपती शाहू… — Devendra Fadnavis (@Dev_Fadnavis) April 29, 2025 The sword was acquired not directly but through an intermediary due to some technical issues, the CM said. Sotheby's, which conducted the auction on Tuesday, said on its portal that the basket-hilt sword (khanda) was sold for 38,100 pounds. The estimate before the auction was between 6,000 and 8,000 pounds, it added. "The slightly curved, European-style single-edged blade with two fullers and imitation maker's marks towards the forte, the spine gold inlaid with Devanagari script, set in a traditional 'basket'-style hilt fully overlaid with worked gold, the grip covered in green woven wool," is how the global auction house described the sword. "The inscription in Devanagari script on the spine suggests that it was made for the Maratha general Raghuji Bhonsle (1739-55), who established a large kingdom centred on the city of Nagpur in the north of the Deccan," it said. "The long straight blade has been marked to appear European in origin. Indian imitations of European blades are in the Wallace Collection (inv. 1452, OA 1455, OA 1811 and OA 1873). Swords mounted with European blades made in centres including Solingen in Germany and in Venice and Genoa were known as firanghi (Frankish) and were sought after in Indian courts. "William Hawkins, travelling in India from 1608-13, reported that Jahangir had 2200 swords with German blades in his treasury (William Foster (ed.), Early Travels on India, 1583-1619, Oxford University Press, 1921, p.103)," it said. Raje Mudhoji Bhonsle of the Nagpur royal family congratulated and thanked the Maharashtra government for acquiring the sword. His representatives also took part in the bidding process on his behalf and had bid up to Rs 35 lakh, the member of the erstwhile royal family told the media. He had requested the state and central government to help with getting the sword back to the country, and chief minister D Fadnavis called him and assured that it will be brought back, Mr Bhonsle added. "I want to thank chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, culture minister Ashish Shelar and their entire team on behalf of Nagpur Bhonsle royal family. It is a proud moment that our heritage is coming back," he said.
The Print
29-04-2025
- General
- The Print
Maha Govt shells out Rs 47 lakh for ‘Raghuji Sword'
The sword was acquired not directly but through an intermediary due to some technical problems, the CM said. It is a historic sword belonging to Raje Raghuji Bhonsle, founder of the Bhonsle dynasty of Nagpur, who in 1745 led the battle against the Nawab of Bengal, Fadnavis said on X. Mumbai, Apr 29 (PTI) Maharashtra Government has acquired the famous 'Raghuji Sword' for Rs 47.15 lakh, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on Tuesday. Sotheby's which conducted the auction on Tuesday, said on its portal that the basket-hilt sword (khanda) was sold for 38,100 pounds. The estimate before the auction was between 6,000 and 8,000 pounds, it added. 'The slightly curved, European-style single-edged blade with two fullers and imitation maker's marks towards the forte, the spine gold inlaid with Devanagari script, set in a traditional 'basket'-style hilt fully overlaid with worked gold, the grip covered in green woven wool,' is how the global auction house described the sword. 'The inscription in Devanagari script on the spine suggests that it was made for the Maratha general Raghuji Bhonsle (1739-55), who established a large kingdom centred on the city of Nagpur in the north of the Deccan,' it said. 'The long straight blade has been marked to appear European in origin. Indian imitations of European blades are in the Wallace Collection (inv. 1452, OA 1455, OA 1811 and OA 1873). Swords mounted with European blades made in centres including Solingen in Germany and in Venice and Genoa were known as firanghi (Frankish) and were sought after in Indian courts. 'William Hawkins, travelling in India from 1608-13, reported that Jahangir had 2200 swords with German blades in his treasury (William Foster (ed.), Early Travels on India, 1583-1619, Oxford University Press, 1921, p.103),' it said. PTI VT VT This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.
The Independent
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Grayson Perry's Delusions of Grandeur asks not if it's great or even good art, but if it makes you laugh
A curious figure haunts the Wallace Collection 's largest contemporary art exhibition to date: Shirley Smith, an eccentric spinster who was regularly seen in these galleries in the late 1960s, brandishing a drawing pad and pens, and claiming to be the illegitimate great-great-granddaughter of the gallery's founder Sir Richard Wallace. Drawings and textile pieces purported to be by Smith appear alongside 40 new works by Sir Grayson Perry in the new exhibition Delusions of Grandeur, in which everyone's favourite emotionally empowered Essex man sets out to 'interrogate the very nature of craft-making and our drive for perfectionism'. This isn't the first time Perry has pitted so-called 'outsider art' – produced by untutored, often severely challenged people on the margins of society – against the most exalted high culture, in this instance, the Wallace's spectacular holdings of 18th century Rococo art and design. And it's certainly not the first time he's riffed on the themes of authenticity and artifice, establishment art and street imagery. From Hogarth-inspired tapestries to a British Museum exhibition invaded by Perry's childhood teddy bear Alan Measles on a motorbike, these preoccupations have helped make the 65-year-old one of Britain's most popular artists. Anyone, indeed, who is even slightly familiar with Perry's work, will be figuring Shirley Smith as one of his fictional alter-egos alongside Measles and Claire, his 'little girl' transvestite persona. Yet the 'archival documents' presented to tell Smith's story, including letters and a grubby newspaper cutting, are so expertly faked, I was momentarily befuddled – the fact that Smith is announced from the outset as a 'fictional persona' notwithstanding. So, it was reassuring to note that the heavy-set features beneath the dark wig in the 'vintage' photo of Smith filling the end of the first gallery are clearly Perry's. We like our national treasures to act true to form: that's what makes them national treasures. Since visiting the Wallace Collection as a teenager, Perry has been fascinated by what he sees as the gallery's opposition of male and female aspects, the former typified by its large and sometimes terrifying collection of arms and armour, the latter by the frilly opulence of its great Rococo works – with masterpieces by Watteau and Fragonard beside wildly ornate furniture. A densely engraved steel helmet with alarmingly humanoid features could pass for the kind of thing German armourers were turning out in the early 16th century, until you notice the brass figure of Claire mounted on its forehead with the words 'Cry Baby' and 'Mummy's Boy' etched alongside. In one of the lengthy texts that accompany each exhibit – all very much in Perry's voice – he links his early interest in such objects to his adolescent fascination with BDSM roleplay scenarios. From here on, the show's interest lies not so much in picking apart what's original and what's by Perry (for the most part blindingly obvious), but which works he's offering as himself, and which he's using to 'impersonate' Smith. A tapestry, apparently attributed to Perry, showing an 18th-century portrait of a woman surrounded by the logos of charities supported by wealthy benefactors in need of moral validation isn't the subtlest comment on the links between art, patronage and dodgy capitalism, yet the sheer intensity of the swirling hallucinogenic colour and the intricate layering of the woven imagery make you chuckle with respect at the mad hubris of the enterprise. Another tapestry purportedly by Smith, Fascist Swing, is a wildly over-the-top, acid-tinged take on Fragonard's The Swing – probably the most popular work in the Wallace Collection. This one has the word 'fascist' crudely woven into it, in protest against the rejection of Smith's claims on the place. It wildly overstretches the Smith 'hoax' because it's so utterly unlike anything you can imagine an isolated elderly woman being able to produce. By this stage in the exhibition, I don't suppose even the most gullible visitor will still be swallowing its core conceit. Yet as a piece of wildly inventive textile art, the piece is hilarious in its own right. We don't tend to think of handicrafts and humour naturally fitting together, but Perry has made that his stock in trade, a fact borne out in a selection of new pots. The ornately glazed sides of one vessel feature a meeting of Perry's various personae, including Claire and Alan Measles, with Smith's alter ego Millicent Wallace, a fictional member of the Collection's founding family, watching an earlier incarnation of Smith living rough on London's streets. I was more amused by Man of Stories, a bonkers re-imagining of an anonymous 18th-century bronze figure of a guitar-strumming minstrel, seen as a sort of faux-Latin American votive figure, playing a bass guitar, and sporting a cloak covered in contemporary badges, including ones reading 'F*** the Tories' and 'Brex Shit'. Great popular entertainer that he is, Perry doesn't inhibit himself by pandering to his audience's sense of their own sophistication. A Selection of Drawings by Shirley Smith attractively pastiche two of the best-known outsider artists Madge Gill and Aloise Corbaz, whose densely patterned works are seen in the first room. Perry pretends to be Smith, creating fantasy images of her imagined aristocratic childhood. But to have truly carried it off, he would have had to have worked a lot harder trying to summon a touch of those earlier artists' visionary intensity. In the final room, a notional mock-up of Smith's bedroom, the supposed interplay of Smith and her creator falls apart. A large, boldly patterned carpet – a 'prayer rug for the security of home and the Wallace collection' – looks like a parody of Perry at his clunkiest and most cartoonish. Yet even here there are delightfully clever touches. François Boucher's iconic 18th-century portrait of that Rococo 'influencer' Madame de Pompadour, with which both Perry and supposedly Smith have been obsessed, is represented both by the original painting and a sort of 'therapy' version constructed from strands of wool and random plastic objects. Perry is a unique figure in that the salient question after seeing one of his exhibitions isn't so much 'was it great, or even good art?' but 'did you laugh?' In this instance, I did quite a lot. But the whole thing might have been much funnier if Perry had stuck to his guns in maintaining the Smith guise. No one would have been convinced for a moment, but trying to keep that mask in place could have yielded a lot of great comedy.
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur review – pomposity puncturing gets lost in personae
Grayson Perry is fascinated by outsiders – outcasts, nonconformists, the marginalised and the deviant. He has frequently assumed the outsider position, delivering commentary on class, gender and Britons' petty snobberies. Across his career, he has pronounced on how his medium of choice (ceramics), his crossdressing, or his engagement with popular culture have excited the disapproval of cliques including the art world. Now, as a member of the Royal Academy, a knight of the realm and a ubiquitous presence on TV, that anti-establishment stance is under some strain. He shall hereafter be referred to as Sir Grayson, to keep him in his (elevated) place. Delusions of Grandeur is a classic Graysonian bluff – a title that carries its own takedown (who does he think he is?). Though it is a bluff of a distinctly wanting-to-own-Gail's-and-eat-the-chocolate-babkas-too variety. This exhibition coincides with his 65th birthday, and the Wallace Collection is hung with banner photographs of the artist, glamorous in sheeny tights and a vast bouffant. If nothing else, Sir Grayson is happy to play along with someone else's belief that he is worth celebrating on a grand scale. The exhibition's concept is baroque – or should that be rococo? Sir Grayson has manifested a new alter ego for the occasion – an impoverished woman from the East End called Shirley Smith who has a special bond with the Wallace Collection. Shirley is a survivor of abuse and spent years in a psychiatric institution during which she discovered art. Adding a layer of complexity, Shirley herself has an alter ego – the Honourable Millicent Wallace, rightful heir to Hertford House, where the Wallace Collection is housed. On a large, doomy pot, Shirley Smith and Millicent Wallace appear greeting Sir Grayson's teddy bear Alan Measles, and the artist's other alter ego Claire. All are, for some reason, in 19th century dress. Sir Grayson's Ceramic Universe is populous indeed. And inclined to time travel. Consciously compounding the confusion, the opening gallery displays work by Madge Gill and Aloïse Corbaz, two bona fide 'outsider' artists. Gill exhibited at Hertford House during the war, supplying Sir Grayson with the inspiration for Shirley. Gill and Corbaz's work is displayed alongside a confected newspaper clipping, and looked over by an 'archival' photograph of Shirley in the Wallace Collection, both purportedly from 1970. Aping the curatorial vogue for printing snapshots of historic women artists at massive scale, it takes a beat to recognise the figure in the vintage photograph as Sir Grayson in a bad wig. Oddly, this conceptual framework is not maintained – the pretence that this is a show by or about the forgotten 'outsider' artist Shirley Smith is dropped after the first display. The exhibition disintegrates into a mishmash. Some works are purportedly by Shirley, some are by Shirley as Millicent Wallace, and some are straightforwardly by Sir Grayson. Historic paintings and armaments from the Wallace Collection are interspersed with prints, tapestries, ceramics, sculpture, textile works, drawings, furnishing items and AI-generated self-portraits by Sir Grayson, his fictional collaborators and a substantial cohort of expert artisans. Often the strongest works here are the most straightforward, created without the distancing device of multiple characters. Sissy's Helmet is a piece of contemporary armour, complete with curled eyelashes and tiara, declaring its wearer a 'milquetoast' and 'cry-baby'. There is a gun for shooting things in the past, a neat comment on conflicts both personal and geopolitical. There are delightfully pompous ceramic busts. The tapestries are rococo by way of the Healing Field at Glastonbury, all glitchy psychedelia, frilly bodices and garish colours. For The Story of My Life, Sir Grayson assembles figures he relates to from paintings in the Wallace Collection and sets them within a fantasy Netherlandish landscape in magenta, yellow and cyan. I get the idea – that the art we're attracted to constitutes a self-portrait in absentia – but the tapestry itself struggles to transcend the digital realm that birthed it. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion A more serious sticking point comes with works 'by' Shirley. Sir Grayson cites Madge Gill as inspiration, but there are elements, too, of the late Judith Scott (in a portrait of Madame de Pompadour wrapped in wool fibres). Other drawings and appliqué recall the work of living artists I shall not offend by naming. There is a striking disjunction between the art of these real women who have survived abuse and/or time in psychiatric institutions and the works here. For those artists – Gill, Corbaz, Scott and others – making art was urgent and heartfelt, a strategy for survival. This feels closer to posturing. Shirley and Millicent are not Sir Grayson's first fictions – previous personae include Julie Cope, the Essex 'everywoman' – but in the past, his characterisation has been sharp and witty. Hogarthian. In inhabiting the world of Shirley Smith, he instead seems to be indulging in nostalgia for lost status as an underdog. Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur is at the Wallace Collection, London, 28 March to 26 October
