The trouble with one-liners: they usually don’t resonate past your first chuckle. So I was wondering whether the fairly significant crowd at “The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever” – currently yukking it up at London’s Serpentine Gallery – was there for the fun or for the functioning air conditioning. It was, after all, a forty-year heat record day in a city where aircon isn’t standard fare. Alas, the galleries themselves were the only cool thing about this show.
Winning the 2003 Turner Prize catapulted Grayson Perry (b. 1960) into the UK’s artistic stratosphere, overtaking his previous fame as a cross-dresser. In 2008 Perry was ranked number 32 in The Telegraph’s list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture“. Godknows why! The gallery’s website claims that Perry is “one of the most astute commentators on contemporary society and culture.” This Serpentine exhibition reveals the artist at play with what appears to be a limitless array of mediums and a limited range of ideas. On the one hand, we can admire the ambition of an artist who works (or plays) with painting, sculpture, ceramics
,
(this piece not in show)
textile (tapestry)
woodblock printing
,
and assemblage
.
Indeed, each artifact in this show is finished with a polish that reassures us of the artist’s painstaking efforts at proving himself a master of so many ways of making art.
On the other hand, it’s disconcerting to move through an exhibition constantly thinking of other artists – and remembering that their oeuvres are more developed and (alas) more interesting. Even the show’s title brings up memories of Koman & Melamid’s “People’s Choice” projects of the 1990’s (democracy and elitism by statistics) https://www.diaart.org/program/exhibitions-projects/komar-melamid-the-most-wanted-paintings-web-project. One enters the exhibition confronted by impressive colorfully-glazed ceramics, one of which has cute ‘art’ and other commercial names all over it. But the loudest names here are actually Robert Arneson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Arneson, Rudy Autio http://www.rudyautio.com, and Viola Fry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Frey, whose ideas underpin Perry’s, even when I couldn’t find their names on the sides of the largest vessel.
A few Koons-like gestures felt even more lame – ironically because they didn’t have the grandiose ambitions that inflate (pun intended!) Koons’ work and reputation.
Faux African wooden sculptures, cast in bronze, reminded me of Damien Hirst’s Venice project.
There was even a hint of Mary Bauermeister’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bauermeister stones-and-rock sculptures.
I know it’s problematic to judge visitor reactions checking out their facial and body language, but my guess is that this is a project whose presumed irony and entertainment value seemed lost on most of the viewers. They appeared more grateful for the opportunity to escape London’s oppressive, if brief, heat wave.
Postscript: In the interest of full disclosure, I can report returning on a non-heat-wave-Sunday to find people queuing (Brit-style) to enter this overblown show.
