![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Perry-Reith-copy.jpg\" "\\"BBC")
<\/a>Immediately after his predictably rapturous greeting at the first performance, Grayson Perry raised the question of why he was asked to give this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Reith Lectures. Well, for the first time in their sixty-six years, they were to be given by a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153visual artist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Could one imagine the BBC not to have chosen a winner of, or at least nominee for, the Turner Prize? Gormley having withdrawn a couple of years ago, how many remotely entertainable candidates lay in that small heap of the capriciously favoured? \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Professor\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Tracey Emin?\u00c2\u00a0 Damien Hirst? Even the BBC might have balked at the near-catatonic inarticulacy of a Martin Creed. But Perry vacuously claimed that his selection was explained by his being \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a practising artist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which, in reality, was not even a sufficient condition of eligibility.<\/p>\nThis limitation of the field of candidates was not, of course, mentioned. Does inadvertency, na\u00c3\u00afvety or cheek account for his drawing our attention to another factor a few minutes later, when he said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 anybody can have a life in the arts \u00c2\u00ad\u00e2\u20ac\u201c even me! An Essex transvestite potter \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 the mafia has even let me in\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?\u00c2\u00a0 As he proclaimed this, dressed and painted in a flamboyant caricature of femininity, Perry basked in the sycophantic admiration of that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153mafia\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, including such luminaries as Nicholas Serota. In a video clip, we glimpse the Lord Patten, laughing with respectful indulgence. Was Perry, brazenly, knowingly but deniably, mocking the ideological conformism of his audience? Far from erecting an obstacle to advancement, his ostentation of social and sexual deviance augmented his value for an establishment delighted to advertise the orthodoxy of its ideological commitment to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inclusiveness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. He is surely far too intelligent not to understand this.<\/p>\n
This is not to say that he was or is acting out a pretence. I have no reason to suppose that he exaggerates his compulsion to indulge in cross-dressing, either for the purpose of publicity, or to exploit the politically correct fashion that inverts the cruelty towards deviance often prevailing in the past. There is neither reason nor need to question his own account of his idiosyncrasies. But a pretence that matters very much lay in the BBC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s affecting to suppose a series of pantomime acts to be the vehicle of serious thought. There is no surprise in the corporation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s colluding with that dispiriting regime of compulsory frivolity, which everywhere imposes itself. But the Reith Lectures have had a special symbolic significance in upholding the BBC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s claim to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, despite the tinyness of their contribution to its total output. They constitute a significant test of the corporation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s commitment to its responsibilities. Previous lecturers have been a somewhat mixed bunch, and, as well as very eminent thinkers, the list includes some whom the criterion of intellectual integrity might have excluded. And one wonders about obvious absences, such as Isaiah Berlin or Ernst Gombrich, whether they were ever invited. Nevertheless, there seems to have been, hitherto, a serious effort to recruit serious thinkers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c even if, in some cases, their seriousness might be questionable. There has, of course, been a relaxation of tone in recent years, the talks being given before live audiences and sweetened by the familiarity of their comp\u00c3\u00a8re, Sue Lawley. But their presentation for the first time this year as pantomime suggests that the assertion of the high-flown sentiments in the foregoing quotation is the bluster of pretence.<\/p>\n
The background to this pantomime is the dominating cult of celebrity, which now draws everything into its moral ambit, where the very notion of an argument\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s requiring an attention span longer than a five-year old\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s becomes an elitist affront to the general public. With its huge resources, the BBC has not only the duty, but also the capacity to resist this dominance. The blame for the debacle of this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Reith Lectures therefore falls squarely on the BBC and, of course, on the state-art establishment to which it complacently defers. Perry himself, like his largely fawning reviewers, was probably unaware of how far he was out of his intellectual depth.<\/p>\n
What was said in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lectures\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?\u00c2\u00a0 Many matters connected with the visual arts \u00e2\u20ac\u201c practical, sociological, financial etc. \u00e2\u20ac\u201c were raised, often autobiographically, and usually flippantly. Specific observations were sometimes shrewd, but never enlightening to the undeluded; and no path of consequentiality led from one to another. Essentially, there was no argument at all, although individual points of unconsummated discussion were half identified by confused gestures. And the failure to take the slightest trouble to get things right, would \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or would not that long ago \u00e2\u20ac\u201c have disgraced a sixth-former.<\/p>\n
One illustration: In the first \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lecture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he announced himself to be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153very sceptical of the idea that you can find a kind of empirical way of judging quality, particularly in art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. How bizarre! Would we say of a sonnet by Shakespeare, or a painting by Turner, that it achieved \u00e2\u20ac\u0153high quality\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? Are these samples of a commodity? His \u00e2\u20ac\u0153scepticism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d amounts to doubting that there could be non-aesthetic criteria, readily and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153empirically\u00e2\u20ac\u009d applicable, by which to determine an aesthetic judgement. Who exactly has ever held such an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153idea\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? The manifest impossibility of such criteria has standardly been taken as central to the philosophical discussion of aesthetic judgement. His confusion here exemplifies a characteristic inability of the uneducated to understand that there is a distinction between empirical and conceptual questions (a distinction that may not be easy to make in a particular case). To be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sceptical\u00e2\u20ac\u009d about the existence of such criteria is a little like being \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sceptical\u00e2\u20ac\u009d about the possibility that two plus two equals five. Since it is not the kind of thing about which further information might show us to be mistaken, it is idle to fuss about purported practical examples. Nevertheless, we should perhaps note that it would be difficult to imagine anything better chosen to illustrate his state of confusion, or his failure to get things right, than his main example of the supposed acceptance of such \u00e2\u20ac\u0153empirical\u00e2\u20ac\u009d criteria. This was the content of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Venetian Secret\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, a notorious hoax played on Royal Academicians in the late 18th century. But the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Venetian Secret\u00e2\u20ac\u009d did not even purport to offer criteria of aesthetic judgement, being concerned only with the technique of painting.<\/p>\n
To the extent that a unifying theme can be discerned, it was identified in the toe-curling words of the embarrassingly unembarrassable Sue Lawley, introducing the third \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lecture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So far we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve tried to assess the nature of what art is\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh dear.\u00c2\u00a0 What is art?\u00c2\u00a0 A dauntingly big question one might think. Or possibly a small and unimportant question. If a genuine question at all, it is a philosophical question, and the questionability of its genuineness might itself raise philosophical questions, as could the question of whether, if genuine, it is big and grand or small but noisy.<\/p>\n
Such big (or small) questions have, together with their gratuitously assumed burden of objects and practices, entered and colonized the world of state art, as if the philosophy of art \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or rather, one part of it, eccentrically construed \u00e2\u20ac\u201c were central to, or even constitutive of, the work of artists, qua artists. It is not obvious why competence in this subject should be conferred by the practice of art, nor why it should purport to feature as central to the education of art students, as if directly relevant to artistic practice; rather than arising, if arising at all, in a complementary area of study, established to enhance the humane benefits of that education. When that still happened, these matters were sometimes in the hands of the intellectually competent.<\/p>\n
One consequence of the comprehensive destruction of our system of higher education in the visual arts, from which Perry emerged as a graduate, is a glut of people who deludedly suppose themselves competent in matters entirely beyond their intellectual scope. In the second \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lecture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Perry asserted \u00e2\u20ac\u0153anything can be art \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 but I think the boundaries are sociological, tribal, philosophical and maybe even financial.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Well, can anything \u00e2\u20ac\u0153be\u00e2\u20ac\u009d art or not? What does that mean?\u00c2\u00a0 Does one and the same thing become or cease to be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d according to whether it falls under the jurisdiction of one or other of this strange ragbag of disparate conceptual regimes? Or is this just a confused way of noticing the obvious point that what is accepted, valued or promoted may vary with circumstances or interests? In this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lecture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, Perry did not notice himself making two crucial but eminently challengeable assumptions: first, that to ask what is art is equivalent to asking how to determine whether some object is a work of art; and secondly, that such a determination would be a matter of definition, or decision procedure, to establish the boundary of a category.\u00c2\u00a0 Those assumptions provided Perry with his title \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Beating the Bounds\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and hence with his pantomime prop, a riding crop, which he brandished at intervals to signify \u00e2\u20ac\u0153beating\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at some supposedly significant \u00e2\u20ac\u0153landmark\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on the boundary of art.<\/p>\n
This amused an easily amused audience; but it was hardly enlightening. First: the concept of art cannot properly be considered without some attention to other arts besides the visual, even if the latter is one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s main concern. Secondly, the concept of art is a mental capacity which we exercise in certain kinds of human activity: it is not primarily a principle for categorizing objects in the world. The question of how objects are identified as works of art, if interesting at all, is interesting only if it throws light on that capacity \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and that cannot be simply presupposed. And thirdly, though widely assumed, the notion that we grasp a concept only if we can adequately define a corresponding word, or precisely determine the boundary of a category, is fallacious. A distinguished philosopher suggested that it should be dubbed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Socrates\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 fallacy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. With much of human life, especially in the arts, it is the central areas that matter: the boundaries are often indeterminable, precisely because their determination is unimportant.<\/p>\n
There is a large philosophical literature on these issues, only some of which is difficult. But the foregoing points are very simple; and although they might not occur spontaneously to every educated person, they would be encountered in the course of a modest dip into that literature, which is enjoined \u00e2\u20ac\u201c one might have supposed \u00e2\u20ac\u201c by the responsibility of maintaining the intellectual standing of the Reith Lectures. But Perry is not an educated person. I hope that this is not interpreted as a sneer, for I have a good deal of sympathy with him. To learn about his appalling childhood and abusive upbringing \u00e2\u20ac\u201c recounted without self pity \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is to admire him for defeating the power of conditions which deprived him of most of what we normally take to be needed for healthy mental growth. (I assume that the published account is essentially truthful.) Despite those squalid circumstances, he gained a place at one of the most successfully academic schools in the country, and, for a while, did very well. He is certainly not stupid.<\/p>\n
But these \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lectures\u00e2\u20ac\u009d exhibit, in some respects, the limitations of an intelligent but previously uneducated first-year student: inability to sustain argument, or even to understand what it would mean, or the need, to do so; complete unawareness of important distinctions; and so on. They also betray that ignorance of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own ignorance which imprisons the minds of many beginning students and prevents their progress \u00e2\u20ac\u201c an imprisonment from which, of its nature, it is hard to escape, since awareness of the need to escape is absent. It is, of course, impossible here to consider why much of alleged \u00e2\u20ac\u0153higher education\u00e2\u20ac\u009d not only fails to deal with this problem, but in many areas actually aggravates it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c perhaps by continuing that practice of systematically flattering intellectual immaturity which, especially in the arts, appears to constitute a significant part of secondary schooling. The intellectual level of this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Reith Lectures surely reflects the diseducation Perry received in the chaos of fraudulence which has engulfed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153higher education\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the visual arts.<\/p>\n
And they betray not in content, but in form, the destructive effect on humane discourse of the crass utilitarianism destroying us, which can understand only linear explanations, in which everything is reduced to something other than itself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c something simpler and grosser.\u00c2\u00a0 In his supposed tour of art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boundaries, Perry considered not what art is, but only which \u00e2\u20ac\u0153art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is most promoted, sold or otherwise rewarded, or what is, for any reason, accepted as art. (And if this is held to be a false distinction, then that needs to be argued.) He was, perhaps, not so much the fraudster in this ridiculous pantomime of pretence, as the contentedly defrauded \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the victim of what we laughingly call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153higher education\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and of the BBC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s irresponsible frivolity.<\/p>\n
Eric Coombes<\/strong><\/p>\n The Jackdaw, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …by the frivolity and lack of ambition and academic rigour in the 2014 Reith Lectures. Immediately after his predictably rapturous greeting at the first performance, Grayson Perry raised the question of why he was asked to give this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Reith Lectures. Well, for the first time in their sixty-six years, they were to be given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[165,22,227,258],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comment","tag-bbc","tag-eric-coombes","tag-grayson-perry","tag-reith-lectures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1436,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions\/1436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}