John’s choice of this book has enabled me unexpectedly to revisit my twenties when I used to teach Art Appreciation as part of my adult and general studies remit. One of my gurus back in those days was John Berger, a Marxist art critic and novelist who won the Booker Prize in 1972 with G. In 1972 Berger also made a TV series called Ways Of Seeing, partly in response to an earlier series by Kenneth Clark called Civilisation. Both series were turned into books afterwards and taken together they demonstrate the gulf between the traditional bourgeois individualist way of conceptualising art and the radical socialist way. Clark measures great art in terms of technical innovation and panache whereas Berger sees art as simply reflecting the social and political systems in which the artist lives. For Clark ideology doesn’t really come into art appreciation; for Berger ideology is the only key that opens the door to the conundrum of what we should aesthetically value. He had a massive impact on the direction art appreciation and indeed art creation subsequently took. We see through the lens of whichever ideologies we have internalised – patriarchal, religious, capitalist – and as artists we unconsciously transmit the trappings of those ideologies. Objectivity is a myth therefore. Whether exploring the status of the female nude (he invented the phrase ‘male gaze’) or the status of oil paint or whatever else, Berger lifted the lid on what is really going on when somebody decides to create ‘a work of art’. Without Berger’s pioneering critiques I am sure nobody would be taking much interest in Grayson Perry’s contribution to the art debate today.

In 2013 Grayson was asked to deliver The Reith Lectures and this book is based on them. What has been added are a large quantity of illustrations carried off in a simple cartoonish style with speech boxes and tag lines. Clearly we are in the company of someone who likes to have fun and is a talented communicator. The Independent reviewer describes him as the Jamie Oliver of the art world, a straight talking working class bloke who puts you at your ease and is at pains to deconstruct all the arty farty pretentiousness that one commonly associates with the fine art establishment. He may be a transvestite with a florid marionette style of womanly appearance but in all other respects he is down to earth, one of us and eager to dish the dirt on the Mafia of art dealers and curators who now embrace Perry as one of their own. Not that it was always so. Winning the Turner prize in 2003 for his ceramic vases put him on the map and his star remains in the ascendant.

Graayson tells us he decided to become an artist at the age of 16 when his art teacher spotted his “buried emotions poking through the surface” of his art work. What makes children want to draw and paint? he asks us to consider and concludes that it is essentially “to make meaning”. Drawing etc is a way of groping towards some understanding of life when your language skills are not yet sufficiently developed to express your perceptions in sentences. The great enemy to artistic expression is self-consciousness. Once a child learns about the historical tradition in which art movements exist and how professionals intellectualise the techniques they use, indeed the techniques they are rebelling against – (and rebellion has in recent decades become almost de rigeur for the ambitious artist) – his spontaneity and innocence are compromised. Self-consciousness ‘casts a shadow like the wicked witch of the west across” his imaginary landscape.

I like that idea. It’s probably true in all walks of life that the healthy process of maturation from childhood to adult involves moving from innocence to self-conscious experience then, having learnt how to assimilate those complex insights that make us self-conscious, returning to a state of much wiser and proactively spontaneous innocence. Does that make sense? Anyway I think it’s one of Grayson’s key messages. It’s also one of William Blake’s key ideas, an artist and poet who would not have been so squeamish as Grayson seems to be at talking about the way art promotes spiritual experience. A young boy tells Grayson that the function of the artist is “to notice things”. That’s right. And if the artist makes us share with him what he has noticed in a new and innovative way then we shall necessarily feel differently. Indeed our cognitive faculty, our chattering constantly intellectualising mind may be temporarily “laid asleep” and we may see into the heart of things with what the poet Rumi called “astounding lucid confusion”.

This is anyhow the way it works for me. The mind is of course important but it is only a stepping stone to transcendent experience. Thomas Mann once wrote in The Magic Mountain that “music is politically suspect”. What he meant is that it can elevate us into ecstatic states of being, impassion us so that we lose touch with down to earth practical considerations. All armies have traditionally gone into battle led by the sound of uplifting patriotic music. Great art acts on us like magic mushrooms or LSD. It usurps and displaces our rational senses. Grayson does not discuss any of this – but this is probably because it was outside his Reith lectures remit. He is after all a jobbing potter with a flair for eccentric self-promotion, a televisual populist commodity but hardly a frontline intellectual.

Having said that, he is astute at illuminating the chasm that exists all too often in the art world between the fine art academic and the hands-on artist. Bernard Shaw wrote, “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.” In the academic art world ‘those who can’t’ write pretentious gobbledegook descriptions of what the artefacts represent. Go to any London gallery and read them for yourselves in little boxes underneath the art work. I saw a great example recently in Madeira next to a painting called Down With Reality. It read, “The aethetizisation of desublimated fantasies rendered impotent by unredeemable gestures.” Actually I think the artist probably wrote this himself as an ironic put down of the way academic pomposity carries on.

Certainly Grayson is the very opposite of pompous. Be committed, take your work seriously, is his watchword, but make sure you’re having fun at the same time. You should not paint, sculpt, write, compose etc purely out of a sense of duty. “The metaphor that best describes what it’s like for my practice as an artist is that of a refuge,” he says. “A place inside my head where I can go on my own and process the world and its complexities. It’s an inner shed in which I can lose myself.” Yes, that is very much true for me too. Art work is a great personal comforter and if someone else happens also to find solace or enlightenment or entertainment in your end product then that is a bonus. But you can’t force people to enter your shed. You can’t demand they like its contents. Nor should you allow their indifference to vex you. Grayson is fond of quoting Picasso on these matters – but he does not pick up on what is for me Pablo’s greatest insight. So here it is: “Sometimes you are empty, sometimes you are full. That’s all there is to the mystery of artistic creation.”

4 stars