Skip to main content

Grayson Perry: Super Rich Interior Decoration review – a super stupid anti-rich binge

Victoria Miro Mayfair, London
Selling the mega wealthy crudely stereotyping scenes of their excessive lifestyles is worse than trite. But is the joke really on them?

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 …

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2lDFt9q
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more